In the Western United States especially, water is quickly becoming nearly as valuable as gold, with prices -- depending on the supplier -- climbing as much as 25 percent in the last year. Some agencies have reported nearly doubling their water costs in the last three years. For Roseville, the increase means a yearly water bill of around $180,000, which is easily the park maintenance office's highest budget item.
Regrettably, in the past, much of the water budget for any parks department was wasted. Sometimes, a broken sprinkler head would mean hundreds of gallons flowed down city storm drains over a single weekend, and on 100-degree summer days, patches of grass without sufficient water dried up and turned brown. On cooler days, sprinklers saturated the soil, leaving puddles that drained onto sidewalks.
With California slipping out of an extended and devastating drought, residents quickly complained when parks were over-watered or sprinklers chirped away in the middle of a downpour. But there was, it seemed, very little Roseville -- or any other city -- could do. Each park had a controller set to turn the sprinklers on and off at regular intervals. With tight budgets and limited manpower, there just wasn't any way to reset the timers often enough to suit the fickleness of Mother Nature.
COMPUTERIZED IRRIGATION
"This is the wave of the future, and at some point it will be an absolute requirement for all parks departments to have their irrigation management fully computerized," added Dick Fehrt, superintendent of the nearby 400-acre Sunrise Parks District. The district has currently installed the MIR 5000 in eight of its 38 parks, and plans to retrofit others as money allows.
"The demand for water will continue to rise and so will its cost. Water will soon be the most expensive utility we use," said Fehrt. "But this is not merely about money, it is an environmental question. Water is a scarce resource and this system helps us use it more efficiently."
The system is entirely computer-based, centralized around a PC and Motorola software in the park supervisor's office, and can instantly adjust watering schedules based on input of local temperature, precipitation, humidity and even wind. Out of the weather inputs, the system creates an evapotranspiration (ET) number which is then multiplied by the park system's crop coefficient. The crop coefficient is a theoretical number that estimates the amount of water needed to replace what the parks' plants and grasses will lose to evaporation during the day. The ET number is, naturally, changing as often as the weather, but in the past it was nearly impossible to compensate for daily changes. Large park areas were regularly subject to over- and under-watering.
In Roseville, the weather input comes from the local weather station, provided by Motorola, which is called by the computer at 8:30 p.m. each evening. Not all systems are installed with a weather station, though the $10,000 option is recommended to produce maximum water savings. Many parks departments rely on calling another weather service monitoring system, like the California Irrigation Management Information System, to get the ET number for their area.
With a local weather station, information is more accurate and can be accessed at any time of the day or night. In either case, after receiving the ET number from the weather station, the computer, or central control unit, then sends out a burst of information via radio waves to the satellite controllers in individual parks, resetting their timers to meet the next day's water needs. "Before computer-controlled irrigation systems came along, agencies had to send a maintenance worker to reset the clocks in each individual park. The potential labor costs were so high that it meant small parks systems could reset the timers on a monthly basis, but most only reset them twice a year -- in May and August -- regardless of specific weather patterns," said Eric Scott, Western states area irrigation control products manager for Motorola.
"Park superintendents didn't have the manpower to adjust the controllers manually, so they just set them up based on worst-case scenarios and watered the same amount every day," agreed Rick Malkin, product manager for the California-based Rainbird Sales Inc. -- Motorola's leading competitor -- which manufactures the Maxicom Central Control Irrigation System.
Computerized irrigation systems are in use in hundreds of commercial applications, including everything from the Rockefeller estate in Virginia to Disney World in Florida. There are several brands on the market, but the Motorola/Toro partnership and Rainbird currently hold about 80 percent of the $50 million-a-year worldwide market, according to data provided by Rainbird.
SAVING MONEY
Purchasing the systems can be expensive, ranging from tens of thousands of dollars for small parks departments or other commercial uses, up into the millions needed to cover extensive park acreage, like the Motorola system covering San Jose, Calif.'s, extensive neighborhood parks system. Most are built piecemeal, with superintendents retrofitting older parks as money is made available. Still, according to park superintendents and system manufacturers, computerization can pay for itself in a few short years, and then continue to return dividends in the years to come. For San Jose, a $1.5 million investment made in 1989 reduced its $1 million yearly water bill by $300,000. Even with the addition of new equipment in the ensuing years -- at a cost of about $200,000 -- computerization has already paid for itself.
"Water prices are going up everywhere -- even in areas where there is an abundance of water -- because the infrastructure to deliver the water is so expensive to build," said Malkin. "We see a range from 10 percent to 50 percent in savings as a result of a computerized system, with an average water-usage reduction of 35 percent. In most cases, it takes about three years for the system to pay for itself." And that doesn't include the savings in labor costs.
SAVING TIME
More than just a water manager, computerized irrigation systems can serve a variety of functions. In most cases the system can be programmed to shut down immediately if unexpected rain begins to fall or can close an area control valve in case of a leak. "A decade ago you'd get a call from a citizen complaining that a busted sprinkler head had been spewing water all night or all weekend, now you find that the computer has already detected the leak, shut down the affected area and issued a report," explained Mike Ginelli, irrigation manager for West Star Distributing, a Hayward, Calif.-based company that distributes the MIR 5000. "Sensors can be set to detect a maximum flow, and if it is exceeded, automatically shut down the area. If the bust is in a mainline, the computer can be set up to page an on-call maintenance person immediately."
Because of these types of features, maintenance departments are not only saving water, they are saving time. Rather than running from crisis to crisis, park superintendents can plan their days around needed repairs based on daily reports issued by the computer. "Often an agency has to send workers out every week to turn systems on or off, but with computerized irrigation it can all be done from the superintendent's office, freeing maintenance for other activities," said Ginelli.
"This doesn't really mean loss of jobs, it means making people available for other jobs; it allows cities, counties and park districts to make better use of their existing resources."
Still, in the long run, it does mean needing fewer employees, and in an era when fiscal purse strings are being pulled tighter, the system can result in an unexpected windfall for parks departments.
"We have 23 parks up here and are adding new ones every time a development goes in," said Roseville's Whaley. "Originally, it was estimated that it would take six people to do what three of us are doing today. At a salary and benefits cost of about $35,000 per employee, it means over $100,000 a year staying in the city's coffers."
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Specifications for Roseville's Toro MIR 5000 MIR 5000c Central Controller include:
Supports multiple weather stations, multi-source alarms, hand-held remotes and automated alarm paging.
Trunked radio is the primary method of central-to-satellite communication, however, conventional radio, wireline and telephone systems are available.
Can manage up to 999 MIR field satellite controllers. MIR 5000i satellite controllers and MIR 5000s radio remote input/output units.
