Cobler Logo
All courses12-part course

Water Fundamentals

A free 12-lesson course on water in buildings: supply, pressure, tanks, pumps, safe storage, meters, tariffs, cooling towers, water balance and finding leaks with night flow.

Start the course

How water moves

  1. 1

    Building Water Supply System: How Water Reaches Your Tap

    Water reaches a tap on the 18th floor through mains, a bulk meter, a suction tank, transfer pumps and a roof tank. Here is what each piece does, why Malaysian buildings store so much water, and where the losses hide.

  2. 2

    Water Pressure in Buildings, Explained

    Why the top floor trickles while the ground floor hammers, what bar and metres of head actually mean, and how excess pressure quietly raises both your leak rate and your pump bill.

  3. 3

    Water Tank Level Control in Buildings

    Float valves, level switches and electrode probes decide when your tanks fill and when your pumps run. When one sticks, the water leaves quietly through the overflow pipe and nobody notices for weeks.

  4. 4

    Water Pumps in Buildings Explained

    Transfer pumps, booster sets, duty/standby arrangements and float interlocks, explained without the hydraulics jargon. Learn what short-cycling and a pump that never stops are trying to tell you, and why every leaking cubic metre costs you twice.

  5. 5

    Keeping Stored Water Safe in Buildings

    How stored water in a building stays safe to drink: keeping drinking and non-drinking water apart, air gaps and backflow preventers, why water age matters, what to check in a tank, and who is responsible after the meter.

Measuring and paying

  1. 6

    How Water Meters Work in Buildings

    How water meters measure flow, why they under-read at low flows, and why your sub-meters never quite agree with the utility's bulk meter.

  2. 7

    Commercial Water Tariff Malaysia: How Billing Works

    Commercial water in Malaysia is billed by state operators at rates several times domestic, with an IWK sewerage charge often riding on the same meter reading. Here is how the structure works, and why it makes leak detection pay back faster than owners expect.

Where water goes

  1. 8

    Cooling Tower Water Consumption Explained

    In most air-conditioned buildings in Malaysia, the cooling tower quietly outdraws every toilet, tap and kitchen combined. Here is where that water goes, why cycles of concentration decide how much you waste, and how make-up metering turns guesswork into a number.

Finding and fixing loss

  1. 9

    How to Run a Water Balance Audit on Your Building

    A water balance audit compares the water your building buys against the water you can actually account for. The gap that shows up is almost always the cheapest saving on site.

  2. 10

    Night Flow Analysis: A Daily Leak Test

    Between 2am and 4am, an empty building should use almost no water, so whatever the meter still records is mostly leakage. Night flow analysis turns continuous metering into an automatic leak test that runs every single night.

  3. 11

    From Night-Flow Alarm to Verified Repair: A Worked Leak Case

    A worked water leak investigation in our example office tower: rule out tank refill and legitimate night uses, check the data, find the leak with a step test, repair it and prove the fix over three nights. Includes a second case where the data cannot settle the answer.

Managing

  1. 12

    Water Consumption Benchmark KPIs for Buildings

    A water bill tells you an amount, not whether it is good or bad. Here are the KPIs that make building water manageable: per person, per occupied room, per square metre, per ton-hour of cooling, plus the baselines and alert thresholds that turn them into action.