Savings in Santa Clarita

The officials of Santa Clarita, Calif., are dealing with dwindling water supplies and rising water rates. But instead of letting these negatives continue, they took action.

With the help of ValleyCrest Landscape Maintenance., the city retrofitted antiquated irrigation timers with HydroPoint’s Internet-enabled WeatherTRAK smart systems for 700 acres of Landscape Maintenance Districts, including parks, medians and streetscapes.

Though the project is still in progress, as of press time, the city has already achieved immediate budget relief by reducing the cost of irrigating facilities by 25-40 percent. With water rates continuing to rise, savings are expected to increase in future fiscal years, accelerating the city’s ROI timeline to between four and six years.

Jason LaRiva, landscape maintenance specialist for Santa Clarita, says the main focus of the program is to reduce the city’s consumption, but he also realizes that with water savings come dollar savings.

LaRiva says the voluntary conservation program resulted in no change in the aesthetics of the city’s landscape and has been a great example and selling point for homeowners.

“We’re not turning our landscapes into desertscapes with cacti and sand as some members of our community envisioned efficient water use,” he says, during a recent webinar (visit bit.ly/webhpp to listen to the webinar).“We’re focusing on the responsible use of water and irrigating based on plant needs and not a drop more.”

Richard Restuccia, leader, emerging technologies in water management with ValleyCrest Landscape Maintenance, says the installations are easy and the controllers come with real time remote Internet control.

“With remote Internet control, you don’t have to send a crew out to turn off the controllers ahead of a significant rain event,” Restuccia says. “You can do it quickly and efficiently from any computer or handheld device with Internet access.”

And you can easily turn them back on, if the weather forecast is wrong. In addition, you can customize emails that will alert you when you are having a problem like too much flow. You are signaled to the location and you can fix it right away instead of waiting for someone to see it and report it to you, Restuccia says.

ValleyCrest’s team had a five-step plan for the installation process. First, they sent out a discovery team to find all the existing controllers and document the programming at each station.

Then, the discovery team brought back their documents, and they gave them to the installation team, who started planning for the next day. The next morning they took the controllers to the locations, mounted the hardware and returned the documentation to the trailer.

The field survey is then done, which identifies items that affect the programming. At each location, they need to document things like plant types, soil type and root depth.

“This really becomes one of the most important parts of the whole process because this is where we take the information and start the controller programming,” Restuccia says.

Finally, ValleyCrest set up a time to review each installation with the city and each side signed off to the process.

The initial test sites were monitored from June through November, and during that six-month period, LaRiva says the city saw water consumption reduced 40 percent in comparison from the previous three years.

“We found the most significant savings are achieved through the transitional seasons: from summer to fall and winter to spring. During these seasonal changes, the weather can go through significant changes that historically would have required constant manual program adjustments,” LaRiva says.

Restuccia says the payback period a customer can expect to achieve varies, but he narrows it down to 24-30 months.

He adds that there is no general, expected amount of time to get a project up and running.

“It varies by size, but it can be turned around in a reasonable period of time,” Restuccia says. “A couple of weeks you can be up and running if you wanted to be very aggressive and wanted to go forward with this.”

The author is an associate editor with Lawn & Landscape. He can be reached at bhorn@gie.net.