Start Me Up

You wouldn’t drive cross-country in a car that’s been sitting in a garage all winter without checking the tires and oil, gassing up and generally dusting the cobwebs off the vehicle. The same care should be taken with irrigation systems in the spring when, in many regions, they are coming out of a seasonal dormancy that could leave them with clogged sprinkler heads or failing backflow protection. Whether or not a system operates in a region affected by winter shutdowns, the sometimes-delicate nature of irrigation components requires a little attention from time to time. For this reason, the annual check-up of irrigation systems has become a standard service for many contractors.

Carl Dowse, irrigation division manager, The Bruce Co. of Wisconsin, Middleton, Wis., knows the importance of irrigation check-ups and offers maintenance and system start-ups as an annual service that produces a profit margin of approximately 12 percent. "You definitely need to make sure the systems are operating at 100 percent before you get into the summer season when you need them most," he says. "We offer a spring start-up where one of our service technicians goes to a client’s home and starts up the system, going over it carefully and checking to see if anything is broken, damaged or needing replacement."

Though some larger commercial accounts require an actual crew, a single service technician, equipped with a service van and plenty of spare parts is generally all it takes to run a start-up service or perform a regular maintenance check-up on most residential and reasonably sized commercial jobs.

Dowse says he’s lucky that most of his technicians have been with The Bruce Co. since 1995, so training a technician on the basics is not the issue that it might otherwise be. There is occasional in-house training, but Dowse explains that it rarely covers the nuts and bolts of service but rather company-specific expectations, such as correctly filling out time cards and purchase orders. "But I still try to keep them up-to-date on trends," Dowse says. "About every other year, most of my technicians attend some sort of factory training," he says, explaining that many manufacturers and distributors offer educational training seminars that help fine-tune skills while reiterating the basic fundamentals. Dowse’s employees train with the Toro University irrigation program every other year.

For The Bruce Co., spring start-ups entail more than just flipping a switch to make sure sprinklers are still operating. "Start-ups include us checking the backflow protection as well as the water source," Dowse says. "We start the system and go through each zone to adjust the heads as required. When we adjust heads, we adjust their height, the arc of coverage and the radius of the water distribution in instances where they may be throwing water too far or too short a distance."

Also included in The Bruce Co.’s spring maintenance service is a check of system controllers, which involves programming the controller with a baseline setting, Dowse explains. A baseline setting tells the controller on what days and at what time to open irrigation valves and how much water to deliver to the property zone regulated by that controller. The base line is decided upon by considering the climate conditions for that region in addition to water efficiency and, in some cases, city drought watering restrictions. "We tell the customer what days of the week it’s going to water and the times at which it will begin and end," Dowse explains. "We also tell the customer that as the weather changes they may need to adjust the baseline."

The Bruce Co. has no set price for their maintenance service. "We bill everything on a pay-as-you-go basis," Dowse explains. "We request no payment up front and we don’t have a set price for spring start-ups because you never know what you’re going to be getting into." Instead, The Bruce Co. bills at the hourly rate of $55 an hour for controllers with 12 zones or less. "Once you go over 12 zones [and/or one controller] it would be billed at $55 multiplied by 1½," Dowse adds. "So on a property with two controllers with 12 stations, it would be billed at $110 per hour, which is $55 an hour, per controller," he illustrates.

Dowse adds that there is an additional 5 percent additional charge for out-of-town jobs that can extend as far as 150 miles from The Bruce Co. office. "For instance, we have several jobs in Iowa," he says, "but we don’t charge them for that drive time."

In addition to the 5-percent increase in billing, The Bruce Co. alleviates some of the sting of long drives with smart scheduling.

"We send a reminder card out to our customers and ask them to phone in and schedule an appointment with our appointment secretary," Dowse explains. "They call her, and she has a sheet for scheduling that is divided up by locations. We group appointments that way to save on drive time."

When a current customer calls in, their file is opened from a database program that contains all of their information, including zip code. She can then go to a sheet that lists all of the locations they serve and the days technicians will be working in those locations. "When they call in, we match them with their location and tell them which slots we still have open for that day."

Of course, busy times, like during spring start-ups, can make it hard to adhere to the system, in which case Dowse says the company is glad to make exceptions for the customer’s availability. He explains: "When this happens maybe I’ll go out to the property instead of one of our service technicians, or we’ll have to make an appointment for during the weekend."

The author is assistant editor for Lawn & Landscape magazine and can be reached at wnepper@lawnandlandscape.com. Carl Dowse can be reached at 608/836-7041.