Smart Irrigation |
The Harlan Ranch system uses real-time weather, soil-analysis data to direct water.April 8, 2007By Jeff St. John, The Fresno Bee Shadi Safali can't put a price yet on the water he will save when he moves into his new home at Harlan Ranch. That's because the 1,800-home, 400-acre development in northeast Clovis has a state-of-the-art irrigation system that's one of the first of its kind in the central San Joaquin Valley. The computer-controlled system combines soil analysis data with real-time weather reports to direct just the right amount of water to each lawn, tree and shrub on the property. And it just makes Safali feel better. "Conservation is definitely important," Safali, a Web site developer, said during a Fresno State-led tour of the development Wednesday. "To see it here in application -- it gives you a nice feeling." But for the irrigation experts visiting the development as part of Fresno State's International Water Technology Conference last week, marrying technology and water conservation isn't just nice. It's imperative. As water grows more scarce -- and more expensive -- in California, not to mention even more water-starved regions around the world, developments like these will be inevitable, they said. "We've got all the water today that we're ever going to get," said Andy Smith, state affiliate relations director for the Irrigation Association trade group. "There's no doubt that efficiency isn't doing it because you want to, it's doing it because you have to." That's certainly true in California, where a law passed last year calls for all new landscape irrigation controllers sold and installed by 2012 to be what the industry calls "smart" controllers. For Chris Steele, sales manager for Toro Co., the irrigation giant that installed Harlan Ranch's system, that new law means that the technical terms he used in his Wednesday presentation -- like evapotranspiration, or "ET" -- are "buzzwords that people are going to start learning pretty soon." ET refers to the inevitable loss of water to evaporation from the soil and transpiration from plants, Steele explained. In a perfect irrigation system, ET would be the only water lost. But most landscape irrigation systems waste far more through overwatering, he said. Given that landscape irrigation makes up more than half of all nonagricultural uses of water in this country, that's a lot of water wasted. Toro's Harlan Ranch system, by combining high-efficiency sprinkler heads and its computer-controlled WeatherTRAK system licensed from Petaluma-based HydroPoint Data Systems Inc., can cut that waste by more than half. It can also reduce water runoff by about 75%, which is important because such runoff can carry fertilizers, herbicides and other chemicals to watersheds and aquifers where they don't belong. Technology to limit this waste has been around for decades, Steele said. What's new about the type of system Toro has installed at Harlan Ranch is the price. "The key thing is, Toro and WeatherTRAK have gotten to the point where we can sell a product for a couple hundred dollars" per home, Steele said. That compares with thousands of dollars per home in the not-too-distant past, he said. Kevin Castanos of Wathen-Castanos, one of the two developers of Harlan Ranch, said that if he'd been planning the development five years ago, he probably couldn't have justified the cost of such a high-tech system. Castanos didn't make any hard predictions about how much water the new system will save: "I think the proof of that will be after we've been online for a year." But he said he's sure there will be long-term benefits -- and not all can be measured in dollars. "I'm not going to look to government to guide me," he said of the new state law. "I wasn't even aware of that regulation. Philosophically, I'm looking for sustainable issues." That includes using reclaimed water from Clovis' water treatment plant in parts of Harlan Ranch, Castanos said. "The opportunity to ... perhaps reduce the impact to the aquifer on the eastern side of the county seemed like the right thing to do," he said. What's right also can be profitable, said Chris Spain, president and chief executive of HydroPoint, the developer of Harlan Ranch's weather tracking system. Since 2002, the privately held company has built a customer base of more than 10,000, including 50 city governments and agencies facing a 2010 deadline to install "smart" municipal watering systems, Spain said. The company expects to quadruple its customer base this year. With an estimated 45 million landscape irrigation control systems in the country, Spain said he sees a lot more room for growth. Some of HydroPoint's biggest customers are commercial property management companies and real estate investment trusts seeking to cut rising water bills, he said. "What's driving them is two simple issues -- and the first is money, money, money." The second is the idea that they're doing the right thing, Spain said. To meet those customers' expectations, it's critical that companies like HydroPoint not only follow through on their promises to save money, but to make systems reliable and user-friendly, he said. That's where Fresno State's Center for Irrigation Technology comes in. "They are absolutely the most critical step in making sure smart irrigation is implemented in a fashion that will be successful," Spain said of the testing center that certified the combined Toro-HydroPoint system in place at Harlan Ranch. Without stringent testing and certification, the water conservation industry could suffer a repeat of "one humongous black eye that every homeowner has a strong feeling about -- low-flow toilets," he said. The 1990s federal mandate meant to replace old toilets with more efficient models led to a well-publicized homeowner revolt against poor-performing new toilets. Even though more effective low-flow toilets are now available, their bad reputation still lingers for some homeowners. "My biggest fear isn't competition," Spain said. "My biggest fear is that manufacturers that don't go through CIT standards will go out on the marketplace, misrepresent what they can do and give customers the wrong impression." So far, Fresno State has been busy with the new systems being designed by companies around the globe, said Dave Zoldoske, director of Fresno State's International Center for Water Technology -- a sister organization of the irrigation testing center. About eight different smart irrigation controllers, as well as a half-dozen types of soil moisture samplers, have been tested at the center. The three-day International Water Technology Conference held by Fresno State last week also saw presentations by a dozen or so makers of these technologies, as well as presentations of high-efficiency water sprinklers and other irrigation system components. "When you put all those pieces of equipment together, you've got a very water-efficient irrigation system," Zoldoske said. Indeed, one goal of the water conference is to bring together companies with different products to find new ways to put them to use, he said. Wathen-Castanos made use of CIT's testing information as well as other reports when researching its plans for Harlan Ranch, Castanos noted. Reliability and ease of maintenance were key concerns for the development, where homeowners associations will eventually take over management of the systems, he said. As part of its deal with homeowners, Wathen-Castanos will cover the first year's $48 service charge for HydroPoint's weather tracking system, he said. After that, homeowners can choose whether to keep using it, though the development's public facilities and greenbelts will stay connected regardless. At this point, the number of homeowners in California using this type of smart irrigation technology is likely "a drop in the bucket," Toro's Steele said. California's new mandates will drive growth, HydroPoint's Spain said. But "we think it's going to get a lot bigger more quickly than that," he said. With snowpack in the Sierra Nevada at less than half of normal levels this year, the state could face a dry summer, he noted. But in the long term, the effects of global warming are expected to reduce those snowpacks even further, putting the state's growing population at risk of severe water shortages, he said. Given those threats, it's not the California mandates he sees driving his company's growth: "I think Mother Nature has a mandate of her own." |
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