Skip to main content

Improve Operational Efficiency and Stretch Your Strained Budget with Remote Water Management

It’s that time of year again; annual school budgets are due in September. With municipalities buckling under the pressure of competing priorities, fiscal planning is never easy. That’s why districts are getting smart. Specifically, smart water management creates a quick ROI for schools. As a result, large swathes of budget are being freed up to cover other expenses.

For many of the problems your district is facing, smart water offers up a solution.

Problem: Every time you roll a truck to visit your site, you allocate resources. It costs you money and manpower to fix a problem. Under your strained budget, these are expenses you can’t afford to waste. But leaks, droughts, storms and technical failures are going to happen. No matter what.

Solution: Get more efficient. Replace the manpower with a remote control. Try a cloud-based, centrally managed operating solution. You’ll cut down on truck rolls and frequent site visits. A system like HydroPoint WeatherTRAK Central can diagnose problems remotely, with 360° site visibility into irrigation systems. You’ll get unlimited access to centralized dashboards, reports and real-time controller programming and management from any web browser.

We’ve seen the savings play out in real-time. The Monterey Peninsula Unified School District (MPUSD) includes 26 schools. They used more than 70% of their water for irrigation. With local water costs increasing 29% over just a few years, they dramatically needed to conserve.

After analyzing their budget, they decided to install 25 WeatherTRAK smart irrigation controllers on 14 sites, using grant money from the district and rebates from local water agencies. The results were almost immediate. With only a single irrigation technician working across the entire district, WeatherTRAK controllers acted like a supplemental team of technicians.

They saved:

  • 196 million gallons of water
  • 57% of the water at one school
  • 48% of the water across the district
  • Countless hours and manpower

Jamie King, energy manager of the Petaluma City School District says it best: “When we save water, we save money.”

Problem: As humans, our attention and energy are finite. You’re juggling a heavy to-do list, and you’re constantly calibrating how to attend to valuable public resources. Your busy team might not detect problems until it’s too late. Leaks, breaks and issues can go unnoticed until you get your next sky-high water bill. All the while, your property has been wasting water and causing long-term damage.

Solution: Get more data transparency. HydroPoint WeatherTRAK Central can track water usage and budget, and notify you as soon as something atypical happens. Then, using remote management capabilities, you can effect changes immediately across multiple controllers, single controllers and even across sites. It’s like having your smartest and most hyper vigilant technician onsite, 24/7.

“With only three full-time irrigation technicians and so much turf and landscape, we often felt like on-call firemen fielding emergency calls, rushing into our trucks, and driving up to an hour and a half to fix irrigation problems… sometimes even having to send kids home due to muddy play areas,” says Mark Hurd, a grounds foreman with the Davis School District in Utah. With so many sites spread over a large area, they weren’t as efficient as they needed to be. Between overtime hours, delays in leak-detection and administrative backlog, they simply weren’t keeping up.

“Once our energy committee told me we had to reduce our water usage by 30%, I knew it was time for a better solution,” he told us. His district eventually deployed WeatherTRAK Central, and saw a 100% ROI within the first 60 days.

Through WeatherTRAK Central, they were able to save:

  • 1.6 million gallons of water in the first 90 days
  • 68% of water used within a single school
  • 480 site visits during the first year
  • $50,000 in labor costs
  • $78,000 in utility costs

Problem: Water prices are on the rise, and climate change adds new challenges to landscapes and districts. New initiatives and regulations are putting pressure on municipalities to become more sustainable. Not only is creating a healthy, sustainable landscape good for your budget, it’s good for the planet. Meanwhile, budgets are still under strain.

Solution: Get greener. Compared to traditional irrigation systems, smart systems and controllers conserve countless gallons of water. Several independent research studies indicate average water savings of between 40% and 70%.

Saving water means saving money, but it also has further environmental impact. Smart water allocation means the elimination of harmful runoff, pesticides and chemicals into the greater water supply. You can avoid hardscape damage and excess water waste with smart systems, while optimizing payback and ROI.

“Smarter Water Management has emerged as the next green initiative for schools. [New insight] enables schools to identify and implement sustainability strategies that achieve real-world results,” says Alex Horvath, Managing Editor of School Construction News.

The future is brighter with smart controller technology. Savings today mean future funds for landscape and infrastructure improvements tomorrow.