Commercial · Resilience

A closed restaurant loses more in a day than the tank costs.

Birmingham water is reliable. It is not infallible. A boil-water notice closes a kitchen, stops a dental practice mid-procedure, and leaves a senior living building still owing its residents dinner. Stored water is the difference between an inconvenience and a closed day.

Commercial pricing Quoted after we look at the building

Start an inquiry How we handle commercial work

A large cream potable water storage tank with navy treatment tanks, a brine tank and a booster pump in a finished basement mechanical room.

Continuity Representative storage and treatment sized for a small commercial site. Capacity follows from the hours of operation you need to cover, which is the first thing we work out.

The arithmetic

This is a cost question, not a fear question.

Work out your own number first. The decision follows from it.

Central Alabama Water (formerly Birmingham Water Works) runs a reliable system, and most years pass quietly. Main breaks and boil-water notices still happen, they arrive without notice, and they last hours to days.

The question is simply what a closed day costs you. Take your average day of revenue, subtract the costs a closed day spares you, and that is the number a storage system is competing against. For most restaurants one closed day lands in the same range as the whole installation. For a senior living building, staying open is the requirement.

Where the arithmetic points to waiting, we say so. That is a perfectly good outcome for a phone call.

What a commercial storage build involves

Stored potable water, sized to the hours you need to cover

A booster to put it back into the building at working pressure

Disinfection on the way out of the tank

Backflow protection settled with the water utility, to the arrangement they require, before we quote

A published size chart — hours of cover times your actual draw is what sizes the tank

Questions

Questions we get about this.

How long will stored water last?

Entirely depends on what you draw, which is why we size it per building. We work out your actual hourly demand for the things that cannot stop, multiply by the hours you want to cover, and size from that. A kitchen running hand washing and beverage service alone draws far less than one running a dish machine.

Does this protect us during a boil-water notice?

That is the main reason to have it. A boil-water notice does not mean the water stopped, it means you cannot use it as it arrives. Stored water that was filled before the notice, with disinfection on the way out, is water you can keep using. Your health department has the final say on what they will accept, and we establish that with them in advance, so the answer is already in hand when an outage arrives.

Is this a generator for water?

That is a fair way to think about it, and the buyer is usually the same person. If you already have standby power, the equipment to move and treat stored water can run on it. If standby power is still on the list, sort that out first: stored water earns its keep the moment you can pressurize it.

What does it cost?

Quoted after we look at the building. It depends on how many hours you want to cover, your peak draw, where a tank can physically go, and what the utility requires for backflow prevention. None of those can be guessed from a floor plan.