Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the Sprinkler Nerd Show. It's been a while since we last spoke. I'm your host, Andy Humphrey, and this is episode 154.
You might notice that I sound a bit under the weather today—I've caught a cold. Though I lost my sense of smell last night, which is funny, I don't think it's COVID.
The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of travel, from the Consumer Electronics Show to Calgary for a significant event, then directly to Europe for a week with my wife. I got home and the very next day, I fell sick. Despite this, I'm eager to kick my ass into gear, start producing more content, and get back to regular updates. I appreciate your patience and look forward to sharing my thoughts again on a regular basis.
If you're a regular listener, you might have noticed my absence. It's been since Friday, January 5, since I last released an episode. Life has been happening—fast and hard. I've been incredibly busy, and today, I thought I would do something a bit different. I'm going to play for you a recording of a keynote presentation I gave for the Canadian Prairie Chapter of the Irrigation Association in Calgary, Canada. I was invited to their annual irrigation conference to give a presentation, and I had to think hard about what I wanted to talk about. It's easy to focus on products, their features, and benefits, but those concepts are fleeting. There's always a new product, a new feature, and such things aren't what truly motivate me. Instead, I chose to share a bit about my journey in irrigation, why I chose this industry—and interestingly, it was indeed a choice. Despite the common joke that nobody intentionally enters the irrigation industry, for me, it was a deliberate decision. I was intrigued early on by the fact that sprinklers operated based on a schedule—Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 6 AM—and I wondered why there wasn't better technology to guide water application in the landscape.
So, without further ado, I am excited to share with you my keynote presentation. Before we dive in, I'd like to extend a special thanks to everyone in Calgary I had the pleasure of meeting, especially the entire Board of Directors of the local Irrigation Association, the Prairie Chapter. They have built a fantastic community, and I was genuinely impressed by the level of interest and curiosity everyone showed towards the topic I presented. Thank you so much for your curiosity and for giving me the opportunity to speak at your conference. Here is my presentation.
[00:00:00] Hello, my friends.
[00:00:01] Welcome back to The Sprinkler Nerd Show.
[00:00:04] It's been a while since we last spoke.
[00:00:06] Can I say that since we last spoke?
[00:00:08] There's no we in this.
[00:00:09] Since I last spoke to you, I'm your host, Andy Humphrey.
[00:00:12] This is episode 154.
[00:00:16] You might notice that I sound a bit under the weather today.
[00:00:21] That's because I've caught a cold.
[00:00:24] Though I lost my sense of smell last night,
[00:00:27] which is kind of funny. And the very next day I start to feel sick. So just been running ragged, I guess. So anyway, despite this, I'm eager to kick my ass into gear again and start producing some more content and get back to regular updates and regular communication
[00:01:40] with all of you again.
[00:01:41] And I appreciate your patience and really
[00:01:43] look forward to sharing my thoughts again, more What I think I'm going to do is I'm going to play a recording for you of the keynote presentation that I gave for the Canadian Prairie Chapter of the Irrigation Association in Canada a couple of weeks ago. I was invited to their annual conference to give a presentation and honestly, I had to
[00:03:02] actually think hard about what I decided to do was to kind of tell a little bit about my story. What truly motivates me? Why am I doing what I'm doing? Including recording this podcast.
[00:04:20] So instead of talking about products and features, I Decided to pivot Not long into my first job. I pivoted I would say almost right away Into this irrigation industry and that was in
[00:05:42] 2002 so for me it was a deliberate decision
[00:06:44] Although this was the first time I've given this speech or this presentation, I think there's a lot I can build off of and I'm really excited to give another modified version of
[00:06:50] this coming up in a couple weeks in, again in Canada, ironically, in Ontario.
[00:06:56] So I guess that, what are we, I don't know, six minutes in here to my ramble that I wasn't
[00:07:04] planning to do. opportunity to speak at your conference. So thank you for your patience the last couple of weeks. Here we go with this week's episode and my presentation to the Canadian Prairie Chapter of the Irrigation Association called Water Wonder, Unleashing Curiosity in Irrigation
[00:08:20] Innovation. supply store online in 2010. So he's got an online store in the States, but he doesn't have SprinklerSupplyStore.ca. So we have to work on him, make sure he ends up starting that up at some point up here in Canada. So I guess I can give Andy a huge round of applause and welcome to Calgary. Thank you. Thank you.
[00:09:40] Appreciate it.
[00:09:40] Thank you.
[00:09:41] Appreciate it.
[00:09:42] All right, we'll do another quick mic check.
[00:09:45] Can everybody hear me?
[00:09:47] Can everybody hear me?
[00:09:48] Kyle, how we doing? but it's something that I've been searching for for 20 years and The question is drumroll. Well first is there anybody that would like to guess what question I'm going to ask Where's all the money So the question I'd like to ask you and this comes up a lot for me or
[00:11:03] Variations of this when I talk to somebody in the public who really doesn't know anything about what we do
[00:12:04] So I was fresh out of college, I had a degree in horticulture, landscape design, and they thought I knew AutoCAD.
[00:12:07] I only knew AutoCAD enough of what they teach you in school,
[00:12:10] but quickly learned what I needed to know.
[00:12:12] And I was the CAD jockey.
[00:12:14] Their landscape architects were still doing drawings by hand,
[00:12:17] so I would take their hand drawings, convert them over to CAD,
[00:12:20] build the CAD infrastructure, and all of that. that, but I didn't know why I was putting one sprinkler, you know, here or five on this zone or one inch pipe here, inch and a half pipe here. I was just doing what I was told, but I really liked what I was doing and I really liked the different facets of the irrigation industry. I was young and this was my first job and I felt like, man, we've got Google, we've got the internet, we've got tech, why is this, why are these sprinklers just coming on because it's the right time? Paul wondered the same thing. We were like two peas in a pod. We both saw better opportunities and ever since we've been working down this path of trying
[00:15:03] to understand what would be the entire history of the planet. And it might just be that either nobody asked the question,
[00:16:21] or nobody asked the question and then took some action
[00:16:26] to try to figure it out. trying new things, experimenting. And what you'll see in this picture is yes, two batteries are powering this controller, not because that's the way it was designed, but because this site had no power initially. And the contractor said to me, I can either buy 40 battery operated modules,
[00:17:40] and I said, well, let's do this.
[00:17:42] Let's do it this way.
[00:17:43] So that's why the batteries are there.
[00:17:45] But what's most important about this image Okay, so half, two thirds. At this time, Baseline did not have a controller. This little module here actually plugged in serial port to a computer. There was no field units at all. The entire software package ran on a computer. They didn't have any field controller.
[00:19:01] So, it was almost like Baseline kind of needed a controller to put their product into.
[00:20:05] Oh, now you know. Green Bay.
[00:20:07] And this is a baseline 3200 controller right down on the sidelines at Lambo Field and Green
[00:20:12] Bay totally loves, love their technology.
[00:20:16] And I was there doing some training and I thought, you know what, I'm here.
[00:20:21] I should just update your firmware for you while I'm here. But you have to stay in there, stick it out, and find the solution. So that's how my day ended up in the pressure cooker on the field at Lambo trying to fix their irrigation system. And of course, we can't leave Lambo without some sprinkler pour, and so let's play this video just for fun.
[00:22:43] of these job skills sound familiar?
[00:22:46] Can you guys relate to some of them?
[00:22:49] Is there anyone, can relate to all of them?
[00:22:51] Awesome. Nick, right? Yeah. Yeah, I agree.
[00:22:55] Can definitely relate to a lot of them.
[00:22:58] What particular job do you think these skills describe?
[00:23:04] Irrigation?
[00:23:06] Mm-hmm. Any other guesses?
[00:24:07] And it gave me the same list, but there was one job skill that was different. Okay, I'll blow it up for you. One job skill that was different.
[00:24:12] Soil and plant knowledge.
[00:24:15] Right, that was the one thing that was different between the skills of a plumber
[00:24:20] and the skills of an irrigator. Soil and plant knowledge.
[00:24:23] Understanding how different soil types and plant species affect irrigation but we could say no it's harder to be a plumber because you have to have certifications and anyone just can't be a plumber and you got to go through all this schooling. But plumbers don't have to learn about plants and soil. If a plumber wants to, if somebody asks a plumber, I want how do I reduce my water
[00:25:40] consumption? All the plumber has to do is switch out the toilet. You go from a 5
[00:25:45] liter per flush to a 3 liter per flush or whatever they are here and you're adding pressure regulators, pressure regulating valves, pressure regulating sprinklers, ET based controllers, right? What is smart when you look at all that, it can get complicated really, really quickly. And we see a lot of what I might what I might call noise, so much noise. Every manufacturer has a claim and this
[00:27:03] and that and this saves 20%, this saves that mean if I switch the nozzle guaranteed 30% water savings? It's not like switching out the toilet or the shower head. It's not quite the same. And so if you looked at your system, and these you guys have probably had
[00:28:21] these same thoughts, if you switch the nozzles and you had pressure and using but then when. And so those two things go together, right? You have to kind of think of it together. When and how long. How long is a duration, you know, runtime? When would be more like a day and a time. And so what I'd like to do is transition a little bit
[00:29:42] into looking at some data.
[00:29:45] What we're looking at here is a,
[00:29:47] it's a real soil moisture graph, rain event, but there's one here that does not have a rain overlap. Right? So if we're looking at the data, you know, remotely and we had rainfall, we would see that either somebody got a hose out on this day or the sprinklers came on. Right? When you think back to what
[00:31:03] I've mentioned about all the percentages and nozzles and switching the controller and head-to-head So we have a Netafim hydrometer, we have a pressure transducer actually wired into the port on the Netafim hydrometer, and then we have a wireless smart valve actuator, and then we have a wireless soil moisture sensor. So on this one valve, we have flow, pressure, soil moisture, and valve actuation.
[00:32:22] And what this allows us to do is see the data, you know, in Hawaii.
[00:32:26] We can look at it anytime we want.
[00:32:28] We can see in the data.
[00:33:46] These blue bars represent a rain event. So what I like to do is that's all looking very detailed, like down in the weeds, right? Down in the soil, very detailed. But not all projects warrant audit might need to be done, but if you have a hundred parks, how do you know which park you're going to audit first? Which one you're going to do last? Which one has a savings potential? Which one doesn't? So I want to
[00:36:22] point out a couple things that Paul and I have, I shouldn't say figured out, irrigated area. Not the entire area of the park, just the irrigated area. Okay, what are the square meters of irrigated area? Then run a calculation, just see how many liters per square meter is the park using. Right? In last year, let's say, last growing season, how many highest consumption per irrigated area, finding those anomalies. So this is a text that Paul sent to me on March 26, 2021.
[00:39:01] And he says, I think I may have officially found my first million dollar leak. water is off. And Paul's looking at the meter and the meter's spinning but the water's off. So he knew right away that this park had a leak and what's interesting about this park and why they didn't know it is that it's all volcanic rock in Hawaii. So somewhere there's a leak and the water just gushing down into the ground. And they found this by accident. They were literally driving one of their trucks across the park and then it just went down into the sinkhole. So this is like an exaggerated example of an anomaly, but they're actually out there.
[00:41:41] And so sometimes when we start looking down at the nozzle level and the catch-tank level,
[00:41:46] we need to step back and just go back to the water meter.
[00:42:45] Why and how can we save water on a site?
[00:42:47] But I don't think we can start by looking at the nozzles and doing an audit.
[00:42:49] I think we need to start by looking at how much,
[00:42:51] what's the consumption, is that actually making sense?
[00:42:59] So, coming back around,
[00:43:02] how long should you water your lawn?
[00:44:05] was his biggest mistake. Do you remember that, Craig? Let's see if I got it right. What did your grandfather say? Do you remember? Or I'll say since I got the...
[00:44:12] Work with his best friend.
[00:44:15] Work with his best friend. And he didn't quite understand why somebody would want to buy a
[00:44:20] cheeseburger from their car window. We're talking about McDonald's here. Why someone