If these sound familiar, you need an upgrade.

Reactive maintenance, lack of system visibility, and subpar system information make your job more difficult than it needs to be. Hotel engineers and maintenance leaders deal with these challenges all too often, keeping them scrambling to fix issues instead of preventing them.

This isn’t just an inconvenience. It poses real operational and financial risks to your property.

But being in this position doesn’t come from inattention, lack of knowledge, or inexperience. It naturally results from an outdated approach to managing plumbing systems in hotels.

The good news? There’s a better way. Modern technology can help you stop playing catch up with your maintenance.

These are three common signs it may be time to rethink your hotel’s water management strategy—before avoidable plumbing issues start costing you tens of thousands.

Sign #1. You’re stuck in a cycle of reactive maintenance

Picture this:

You're the engineering manager at a 350-room hotel. One night, during a high-occupancy weekend, a hot water circulation pump fails unexpectedly. Guests on the upper floors start complaining about low water pressure and cold showers. The front desk is overwhelmed with calls.

You immediately send your maintenance team to troubleshoot, but they have to use trial and error to pinpoint the issue. Once they identify the problem, they realize you don’t have a replacement pump on hand.

Your only option is to order a new pump (with expedited shipping).

This emergency purchase blows a hole in the maintenance budget, so now you’re boxed into keeping other outdated, inefficient equipment. Needed repairs and upgrades are going to have to wait.

Why it matters:

Many hotels fall back on the old “pop and swap" approach to maintenance—waiting for a part to fail before replacing it. Your team is probably stretched thin as is, dealing with immediate issues instead of focusing on long-term improvements. And it’s hard to even know what to plan for without having a more comprehensive view of your plumbing system.

Without the ability to predict plumbing system failures, or to quickly diagnose them when they do happen, you’re stuck doing reactive maintenance. This brings with it higher long-term costs, difficulty planning for the future, and increased downtime and disruptions.

How to fix it:

A smart water management platform like Nexa helps you predict which components will need attention next, allowing engineers to budget effectively and prevent costly emergencies. By monitoring system-wide trends as well as individual system elements, teams can address issues before they escalate.

Instead of waiting for failures, predictive maintenance gives you the ability to see declining equipment performance in advance, allowing you to replace it on your own timeline. That way, you can plan and budget ahead for equipment upgrades, so your maintenance can be strategic, not reactive.

Sign #2: You don’t have visibility into your plumbing system

Picture this:

You’re the director of engineering at a large regional property. The energy bill just posted, and it’s above average. Not just a little higher—it’s almost 3x your usual bill. And you don’t know why.

Now you’re on the hook to find the issue. But you haven’t found any obvious leaks, which means whatever’s happening isn’t visible to the naked eye. So your team has to spend time and resources hunting through your plumbing system for the culprit. What you don’t know—yet—is that a faulty check valve has been leaking hot water into the cold water circuit. Not enough that anyone can feel it at the tap, but enough that it’s driving your bills up.

The worst part? You can’t even get a plumber out to the property to diagnose the problem. Without some indication of what the issue is, plumbers just don’t want to take on the burden of trying to identify what’s wrong.

Why it matters:

When you lack visibility into your plumbing system, you aren’t able to make a quick diagnosis when issues crop up. Instead, troubleshooting is slow and costly. You have to physically inspect pipes and valves section by section. Meanwhile, the issue persists. That could mean money down the drain, guest disruption, even significant leak damage.

Making matters worse, without a clear idea of what’s gone wrong, you’ll struggle to get a plumber on site. If you can’t give them some actionable information, they’re unlikely to take the job.

Equipment failures are a fact of life. But the impact of those failures is magnified without the ability to to locate and diagnose problems in your system.

How to fix it:

A digital water monitoring system eliminates guesswork. Nexa, for example, tracks flow rate, pressure, and water temperature in real-time, helping hotel engineers—and their contractors— pinpoint discrepancies instantly. Instead of invasive, time-consuming exploration of your plumbing system, a smart system like this lets you see everything happening across your property at a glance.

Instead of calling a plumber for exploratory diagnostic work, you can share precise data. In fact, with Nexa, you don’t have limited seats, so you could literally give a plumber direct access, so they would have the same data as you. This dramatically improves your time to repair, reducing labor costs and the cost of disruption.

Sign #3. You don’t have a map of your plumbing system—and nobody else does either

Picture this:

You arrive at your new position as maintenance manager at a midsize property. The staff is welcoming, but as you’re familiarizing yourself with the plumbing system, you notice a valve in the boiler room wrapped in duct tape. Hanging from it is a hand-written note: DO NOT TOUCH. You ask around, but nobody knows what the valve is for or why you shouldn’t touch it. As far as anyone can remember, it’s always been that way. You try looking at the system blueprints, but they’re nearly impossible to interpret and incomplete to boot. In fact, that valve doesn’t even appear in the drawings.

Why it matters:

Many hotel plumbing systems have been in place for decades, and over time, valuable knowledge about those systems is lost. Outdated or missing documentation, unclear blueprints, or crucial system details that live only in one engineer’s memory can make it nearly impossible to diagnose and resolve issues effectively.

Institutional knowledge gaps can make onboarding and training new team members exceedingly difficult. Compromised knowledge transfer can lead to major plumbing issues. Without reliable information, you’ll end up wasting valuable time piecing together a system’s history instead of solving problems.

How to fix it:

The solution is a centralized database for your plumbing system. This is a place to keep maintenance logs, replacement schedules, schematics, notes, and any other information you might need. A modern digital water management system like Nexa consolidates your system information, ensuring that everyone—engineers, contractors, and new hires—has access to a single source of truth.

A smarter way to manage your hotel’s plumbing

Picture this:

You’ve got full visibility into your plumbing system. You and your team get alerts for pressure drops, temperature fluctuations, and leaks. Instead of playing catch-up with equipment maintenance, you can actually plan and budget for needed upgrades, improving your team’s efficiency and reducing utility costs.

When failures do happen, you’re able to diagnose the issue from anywhere quickly, and then share that data with plumbers and contractors immediately. No more sifting through incomplete system drawings, or hoping the one person who knows about the boiler doesn’t leave for a job somewhere else. The system that used to be opaque is now wide open for you to see, with real-time and historical data, so you can understand how your system works now and how it behaved in the past.

Smart water system management, like Nexa, is the solution. It works with your existing infrastructure. And it’s more affordable than you might think. In fact, many customers see 3X ROI within the first year.

There’s no time like the present to update your approach to plumbing system management.