The Importance of Maintaining Legionella Controls Where COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Controls Reduce Occupancy
Government guidance to reduce all but essential travel and meetings has reduced the number of people using many buildings for work, leisure and other purposes, which will inevitably have an effect on water use, reducing turnover overall and creating individual underused facilities. If action is not taken, or if routine controls are allowed to lapse, the result will be deterioration of the water and the water systems, increasing the likelihood of legionella colonising parts or whole systems. How ironic it would be if precautions to avoid catching one severe respiratory illness led to another!
It is therefore essential to take into account this new stagnation factor in your legionella control regime and to ensure at least moderate water turnover is maintained throughout, with increased flushing where required. In many cases, this will prove to be very straightforward and only involve checking taps and showers are in daily use or flushing them thoroughly to be sure, weekly in most buildings and more frequently in healthcare premises. In other cases, or if the reduced number of occupants goes on for a long time, more precautions might be required. This could be cleaning and disinfection of tanks, calorifiers and distribution systems after periods out of use or more frequent (for example, quarterly) inspection and / or cleaning and disinfection to compensate for overcapacity.
If you have concerns or you are not sure how to adapt your scheme of control to the new occupancy levels, contact Zeta and we will be there to help.