The Water Drop™: Episode 8

Why Should I Take Advantage of Legionella Testing?

The question that is always being asked to us is, "I don't have to test. Why should I?" and probably in all of our presentations and all of our customer conversations, probably one of the biggest objections that we get or biggest areas of discussion that we have. And really, I love this statement that is pretty common in the industry, and that is, "Well, the goal here is to prevent Legionnaires' disease. The only way to prevent Legionnaires' disease is to not come in contact with the source of Legionella. The only way to know if you have a source of Legionella is to test."

When it comes down to it when you kind of reset on what the goal of the Legionella program is, it's to avoid Legionnaires' disease. It's zero cases. It's not necessarily zero Legionella. That would be great. But really, what you want to do is avoid cases of Legionnaires' disease in your building. And by doing that, you need to know if you have it or not, so that's really the most important reason.

The second reason is to validate your Water Management Plan. If you have a Water Management Plan in place, you're doing everything in it, you don't know what's working unless you test your water system for it. And so ASHRAE even calls out that you need to validate that your Water Management Plan is working as intended, and the best way to do that is to test your water system. We hear sometimes is that "Well, if I test for it, you might find it."

Finding it's not a bad thing. Finding it is actually a really good thing, because then you can do something about it in a proactive manner, you don't have to have the Department of Health involved. You can come in, take care of the problem, get back to normal operation, implement whatever practices will help not have that happen again, and get on with your day. Just by doing a little bit of testing, you can avoid a lot of headaches.

Be Proactive with Legionella Testing