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In Texas, saving water is of the utmost importance, says Pyle, who works out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. \u201cWe have several water districts here that regularly go to one- or two-day-a-week watering, sometimes even as far as one-day-every-two-weeks watering. But people who have smart controllers can get a variance to irrigate additional days.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe advantage of a smart controller is that it\u2019s thinking far more about the irrigation than a homeowner is ever going to,\u201d says Matt Hall, product marketing manager for Irritrol and Toro brands at The Toro Company\u2019s irrigation division, Riverside, California. \u201cWhen you shut the controller door, the homeowner never has to look at it again. Every day it gets its weather information, makes the calculations and adjusts the run times accordingly.\u201d<\/p>\n
The beauty of smart control, says Hall, is that it takes the user out of the equation, because the user is not very efficient. He uses himself as an example. \u201cMy life is so busy that when I finally notice that fall has come and I should turn my run times down, the grass is already going dormant. I\u2019m a month behind a smart controller that would have already made that calculation and ramped the irrigation schedule and run times down.\u201d<\/p>\n
Providing better service<\/h2>\n
The connectivity revolution has made smart irrigation control as close as the nearest smartphone. It used to be that only expensive central control systems had the capability of managing multiple sites or projects. \u201cNow, contractors can look at a map and see where all the systems are and be able to touch all of them,\u201d says Ben Sacks, associate product manager, controllers, Hunter Industries, San Marcos, California.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen daylight saving time comes around, they don\u2019t have to physically go to all 100 or 1,000 of those clients and turn their clocks back an hour. They can do it automatically from the comfort of their office or truck.\u201d This amounts to a huge time and labor savings. Sacks says contractors have also been able to charge clients a monthly service fee for the ability to get text alerts and monitor and change schedules remotely.<\/p>\n The ability to manage systems from afar may seem like a benefit that\u2019s just for you, the contractor. But it also allows you to give better service to your clients.<\/p>\n \u201cPrevious to having this technology, a contractor might be on a client\u2019s property once a month or once a quarter identifying fixes or potential issues,\u201d says Joe Porazzo, product manager, connected devices, contractor division for Rain Bird Corporation, Azusa, California. \u201cNow, when a property owner notices a problem and calls, a contractor can say, \u2018We\u2019re aware of it, and a tech is already on route.\u2019 This builds customer trust and makes you look like a better service provider. In a business that\u2019s built on word of mouth, trust is everything.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou can get a push notification on your phone about a catastrophic leak,\u201d says Miller, \u201cand turn off the master valve before the leak damages the landscape or the concrete parking lot. And you can do that while you\u2019re on your vacation, from right aboard the deck of a cruise ship.\u201d<\/p>\n Is a smart controller enough by itself, or should it be used in conjunction with things such as soil moisture and rain sensors and flow meters to get optimum water savings? Miller thinks so. \u201cYou really need to use them with soil moisture and rain sensors for them to work at their optimum level.\u201d<\/p>\n He cites a recent study out of the University of Florida. It found that a smart controller combined with soil moisture sensors is the most powerful of all controller\/accessory pairings, saving at least 30% in water use.<\/p>\n \u201cRain Bird has done research in this area too,\u201d says Porazzo. \u201cWe know that rain sensors on average can save up to 30% on a water bill at a residential property. You add a soil sensor to that, and now you could reduce water consumption by 50% to 55% with little to no negative impact on the health of the property.\u201d Miller says weather information should come from as close to a site as possible. \u201cMany of the smart controllers that irrigate according to evapotranspiration rates use data from the nearest weather station or from an internet service like Weather Underground. But those weather stations could be miles away and fail to take microclimates into account. In our area in Florida, one street could be dry, but a block away, there could be a downpour. I encourage people who have smart controllers that use weather information to install their own on-site stations.\u201d<\/p>\n More locally to the client, smart home devices are used to integrate systems inside the home such as security, air conditioning and even window shades. But irrigation has been slower to integrate into the \u201cinternet of things.\u201d<\/p>\n Hall thinks he knows why. \u201cThe benefit of smart home connectivity is more on the landscape lighting side, because that brings the property owners outside,\u201d he says. When people have outdoor lighting systems with smartphone control, they want to play with it and create various moods and effects. Pyle says smart home integration for irrigation has been slow, \u201cbut I think we\u2019re on the cusp of a breakthrough. Everything else in the house is already there.\u201d He thinks that what\u2019s more important is closing some of the gaps in smart controller technology, such as adding weather-predictive features.<\/p>\n Smart-hub connectivity plays out differently in the commercial realm, according to Pyle. He says that some of Conserva\u2019s large retail clients wanted smart-hub connectivity when it first came along \u2014 but not anymore. \u201cRight now, they\u2019re not okay with having some connected device plugged into their network because of possible data breach issues.\u201d<\/p>\n Learn to use smart irrigation devices to deliver results for clients.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":3224,"parent":0,"template":"","main-categories":[27,36],"class_list":["post-3218","features","type-features","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","main-categories-irrigation","main-categories-technology"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/innovativepixel.com\/IGIN\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/get-smart-3.jpg\")
Other smart devices<\/h2>\n
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\nHydro-Rain has incorporated an element of irrigation auditing into its smartphone app. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the coolest things that we\u2019ve implemented \u2014 a catch cup test,\u201d says Jared Marshall, marketing manager at Orbit, North Salt Lake, Utah. This app gives you the distribution uniformity, and it is calculated in the background in our algorithm.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/innovativepixel.com\/IGIN\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/get-smart-5.jpg\")
\nThe very nature of irrigation doesn\u2019t lend itself to that. \u201cWatering often happens early in the morning or late at night, invisibly,\u201d says Hall. \u201cAs a homeowner or property manager, you just want nice, healthy turf and landscape, and you don\u2019t want to think about it.\u201d For landscape irrigation, the smart piece is more important than the smart home piece. That\u2019s where the water conservation comes from.\u201d<\/p>\nThis article originally appeared in Irrigation & Green Industry magazine.<\/em><\/h6>\n
Mary Williams-Villano<\/strong><\/a> is a contributing editor to Irrigation & Green Industry and can be reached at pouncerspy@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"