For states experiencing drought conditions, water conservation in landscape is a necessity. But for Tennessee, the sixth rainiest state in the U.S. according to the National Weather Service, concerns of drought don’t often motivate customers to implement more water-efficient landscape methods.
That changed for Andrew Moberly, CLIA, the irrigation manager at Yellowstone Landscape in Nashville, when a client contacted him with a desire to upgrade the irrigation system covering about 2 million square feet of commercial property and save as much water as possible. This client, Moberly recalls, wanted to be on the forefront of water conservation in the Nashville market.
For Moberly, his five-member irrigation team and others who signed onto the project, it gave them an opportunity to do something revolutionary in the area. They installed a weather-based controller and timers and performed extensive audits to perfect the watering process.
“In Nashville, it’s kind of an untapped market for this,” Moberly says. “This was a perfect opportunity to be that spearhead here.”
The first step
To get the ball rolling on this water conservation project, Moberly says it started with getting to know the client. The two most vital questions he sought to answer were: What are their needs, and what do they want to accomplish through this project?
“They want to be on the forefront of this national market of water conservation,” Moberly says. “That was their main goal per their company-wide green initiative.”
But for a massive plot of fescue turf dotted with warehouses, mixed-use properties and driveways, this wouldn’t be an easy feat.
To meet these water efficiency needs, Moberly knew the first part of the project’s puzzle. Step one, he says, was to change all of the current irrigation timers to weather-based controllers.
“It’s really the only way to have your schedule adjust daily without going to that site, doing your 10-step equation and then adjusting for the evapotranspiration loss,” Moberly says. For him, there’s no better way to conserve water and save a client money than going to a weather-based controller right off the bat.
He provided the client with all of the different manufacturers they could think of to present multiple options. In the end, they chose a brand that Moberly had worked with in the past, as Moberly felt comfortable that it would fit his client’s needs best.
Controller installation
With the plan of installing weather-based timers set, Moberly, his team and the client looked at the project area’s portfolio to determine where the larger solid blocks of turf by square foot were, and thus where they’d start.
“Whatever had the larger square footage of turf, we would start there for a better return on investment,” Moberly says. “There’s tons of fescue turf out there that is watered during the growing season.”
But when taking inventory of the existing system, the initial plan came to a slight roadblock. Initially, Moberly wanted to put master valves and flow sensors on everything. For about half a dozen of them, this plan didn’t work due to a 20-foot driveway in between the backflow and the timer. The biggest issue was that he couldn’t get the wire path he wanted in some instances, so he had to get creative.
Nonetheless, installation of the weather-based timers was able to commence. Employees from the controller manufacturer came out to the project area and provided training to Moberly’s staff, where technicians from his team learned how to use and program smart controllers.
Together, the installation team became comfortable with weather-based timers, learned how to program them and how to input the data they needed.
The hard part
With the weather-based timers installed and data obtained, next came what Moberly described as the “hard part” of the project: finding out how to manage the system and get the most effective water conservation results possible.
This is done, Moberly says, by carefully and individually auditing the entire system.
“We’re going a little bit deeper into it and finding out why exactly is this system using these gallons per minute, what is our precipitation rate, what is our distribution uniformity, and then how can we better that?” Moberly says. “It’s a long process with a lot of math involved, but it’s an exciting one that’s just an ongoing process we’ve been dealing with.”
Moberly and his team have put catch cups out in a grid around the property and run the zone for 10-30 minutes depending on the sprinkler type. They then read the volume of each catch cup, which will show how even the water was put out and the inches per hour. This information allows the irrigation team to determine ET loss and then formulate what the proper water runtime should be in that given month based on the soil type.
The main goal through the auditing process, Moberly says, is not only to better manage the irrigation schedule, but to find additional areas of improvement.
“When auditing, most people will go there, turn it on for 20 minutes, program the irrigation for the whole year and may not change it at all,” Moberly says. “But by doing this, we can literally change the irrigation or schedule it every month to maximize efficiencies.”
Moberly and his team tackle a couple audits per week across the project area’s many properties with a goal of completing them all by the end of spring.
Emphasize auditing
Moberly says what separates this project from others is his team’s focus on auditing. He earned his Certified Landscape Irrigation Auditor certification through the Irrigation Association at the beginning of the project’s process, which he says gave him the knowledge needed to tackle such a difficult endeavor.
“There’s nobody’s who’s doing the audits in Nashville, and so I think using the audit data is really what takes us to the next level here,” Moberly says. “This is what everyone should be doing, it’s just no one has the time to do it.”
It is due to the audits that Moberly and his team discovered key variance in pressure. He explains that for some properties, they thought the pressure would be too high and required pressure regulation — when in reality, auditing showed that it was 30 or 40 psi on a spray head. But across the street, auditing showed that some properties’ spray heads had 60 to 70 psi. In some of those cases, Moberly and his team were left trying to understand what was causing the variations. “They definitely fluctuated more than we realized,” he says.
By doing hands-on auditing, Moberly learned vital information about the irrigation systems and their differences. He learned that sometimes when you think a system is fine, the distribution uniformity is 50% and requires work.
“It’s been cool to realize the ‘why’ behind the irrigation — stuff that we probably knew, but we didn’t really know why we knew it or how we knew it,” Moberly says. “It’s putting some of the data behind what we we’ve been doing without thinking it through.”
The end in sight
The final steps to the project are taking everything learned throughout the auditing process and developing a plan to incorporate pressure-regulated sprinkler heads and flow sensing on all of the properties.
“Here in Tennessee, (pressure-regulating sprinklers) are not a mandate yet, but we want to get ahead of the curve,” Moberly says. “The client that we’re working for, they’re excited to be ahead of the curve here in our local market with that.”
Moberly says the goal is to get through all of the systems this season, and then have everything running smoothly and updated next year.
But thanks to irrigation’s always-improving technology, this project will never truly be finished.
“In five years, I’m sure we’ll be revisiting the controllers and there’ll be something new that we can add to that,” Moberly says. “Hopefully by then, we have some wireless components and then we can get flow sensing on everything. It’s always evolving.”
Looking back
At the core of this project, Moberly learned the importance of taking the time to complete full audits. He advises others to make sure they follow the Irrigation Association’s auditing process, as it can show a system’s shortcomings an irrigation professional might not know about.
“It all starts at the audits and gathering all the data first,” Moberly says. “Even if you don’t have the smart controller on there, you can use that audit information to actually do a schedule that will really save quite a bit of water, because you’re going to eliminate as much waste as possible.”
Another new component that Moberly learned through the project was a full reliance on technology and the internet. He was no stranger to smart controllers and cutting-edge irrigation technology, but due to the pandemic, the contact he had with the client was fully virtual via Zoom meetings. Moberly and his team also managed the project portfolio completely online.
Through software, Moberly and his team can send any alerts of issues out in the field right to the client, especially for the systems they were able to put flow sensing on.
“Managing everything online has been very eye opening,” Moberly says. “It definitely took away some of the limitations.”
This project gave Moberly the ability to marry a difficult water conservation plan with an in-depth auditing process. It also served as an education opportunity for not only him and his team, but for the client as well.
“This is a cool project where we could dive deeper and then explain to the client that this is your soil type, this is how much water your soil will actually hold,” Moberly says. “A lot of it will go over their head, but it’s still cool to be the leading company in this region doing this.
“I want to offer the client the most that we can and the deepest knowledge we can.”
