Today we rented two minivans and are driving down to Rotorua (home of a huge hot spring). It’s about three hours south of Auckland and we travel through amazing country sides.
After we get to Rotorua and check into our hotel, we walk over to the Rotorua Aquatic Center to look at the many ways that they manage and conserve water. As typical for everywhere we try to go this week, most of the management staff is on vacation, so we talk to one of the mid-level managers. She had a somewhat limited knowledge of their sustainable implementations, but was still very helpful. About five years ago, they proactively started to monitor their water usage to determine ways to conserve water and energy consumptions. They started to turn down pumps at night, installed light sensors controls, and shut down domestic water services at night. The center also identified that they had a water leak in one of their domestic water lines. Repair of this leak resulted in a water savings of about $6,500. The manager also took us out to see their “garden”, which turned out to be two boxes with about 10 plans in it. She was super excited about it too. Haha. It’s a good thing that she took us out back though, because someone asked about a big silver pipe running along a fence line. It turns out that the entire center’s hot water is heated from a geothermal well, which makes total sense because they are about 200 feet from an active hot spring.
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