#221 - Water Consumption Relevancy

[00:00:00] I don't feel like it's something that's taught in our industry. And it's something that on the surface is really kind of simple. Of course you should know how many gallons you're using. I don't even know why it's not regulated that you got to have an irrigation meter. And using a digital flow sensor connected to the controller is awesome, but also there's simpler ways to do it. You don't need to hook up all that technology. You just need a water meter and you can buy them for less than $100 for a one inch or three quarter inch water meter.

[00:00:30] And I think there's a lot of value in just having the numbers. And there's certainly many ways to connect them to the cloud and monitor them remotely and turn that data into dollars for your clients and turn that data into dollars into savings for you and your business.

[00:00:46] And so I just kind of wanted to plant that seed, give you something to think about and maybe something you want to share with me. Maybe you've experimented with this type of technology before. Maybe you haven't. Maybe you've got questions. That would be amazing. Would love to hear your questions and your thoughts about just using old fashioned water meters to record the consumption.

[00:01:14] If you are an irrigation professional, old or new who designs, installs or maintains high end residential, commercial or municipal properties, and you want to use technology to improve your business, to get a leg up on your competition. Even if you're an old school irrigator from the days of hydraulic systems, this show is for you. Hey, what's up, my friends? Welcome back to another episode of the Sprinklin Nerd Show.

[00:01:42] I'm your host, Sprinkler Nerd Andy. And this is Truck Talk. Years ago, I did a couple episodes I was calling Truck Talk. So I just wanted to record something a little different today or the same. I don't know why I say that. I either say I got a quick one for you or I wanted to record something a little bit different. But I'm just recording what's going on in my mind today. And it has to do with water and also has to do with solar.

[00:02:09] But I'm going to hold that thought because I'm waiting to queue up my good buddy, Paul Bassett, to share with you what he's been working on over the last couple years. And he's moving from water into solar. And there's so many similarities. But I wanted to just stay on the water topic today. And Paul has this great project that he brought me into a couple years ago. And I don't want to give too many of the details away because some of it might be confidential. But it's in Hawaii. And he and I did record an episode from the field there years ago.

[00:02:37] But we've been monitoring and putting together a water bill for the community of nearly 1,000 water meters. And that is a combination of home meters, mainline meters that feed multiple homes, let's say, and irrigation meters that deduct from the main meters. And we compiled that all into a monthly water bill that's a utility-grade water bill.

[00:03:03] And a couple interesting things that was on my mind today that I'm going to talk about. One of them is going to be leaks and how we know something is a leak because we don't know with certainty. I would say we know with greater than 90% guess that there's leaks. We're going to talk about that here in a second.

[00:03:27] But they want to talk about how we know it's a leak because gallons, and this is just interesting about data in general. When you have one data point, it doesn't tell the whole story. One data point tells you what the number is, but you kind of need numbers before it to make sense of it for one. And then you might need a different data point to make reason to the number.

[00:03:56] So, for instance, let's just pick a round number. 100,000 gallons. If I said, wow, or I don't even have to say, wow, last month, this water meter used 100,000 gallons. What's that mean? So what? I could say that to someone, and they might say, wow, that's a lot of water. All right. If we were filling up a kiddie swimming pool, they'd be absolutely right. For your residential home, probably that's a lot.

[00:04:27] For, let's say, the entire city of Naples, Florida, that would be nothing. And so gallons needs to be not compared, but you need something else to make relevancy to the numbers. And so what Paul's taught me, and we're going to talk about this more, is occupancy. So inside of a building, you have people and occupancy, and people take showers, flush toilets, do the dishes, run laundry, so on and so forth. Commercial buildings, water used for other things.

[00:04:54] If you happen to be in a hotel, water is going to be used for the sink showers. It's also going to be used for the mass laundry. They might have a swimming pool. Those are the types of things that consume or use water. But to make sense of how much water should this building be using or should this home be using, and Paul likes to say bodies to potties. So we use occupancy as the correlation number to the gallons. And the number that we're using in this project is 70 gallons per person per day.

[00:05:20] So if you know the total for the day, the week, the month, etc., and you know the occupancy, you can make that number, those total gallons, much more relevant or actually make it relevant. And what we're seeing, and let me step back too, one meter might have five homes or might have 15 homes or sublaterals.

[00:05:46] And so what we're doing is we have the entire occupancy count for this community, which is subject to change, goes up and down. How many people are in the homes so that off of the one meter, we know how many people are. So we know how many bodies to potties or bodies to gallons or gallons per person per day, which we are using the baseline number of 70. And of course, some homes could be less, some could be more, but there should never be a home that's 10x as much, etc.

[00:06:16] Unless somebody leaves the hose running right outside or there's a leak and it's going to drain or it doesn't even have to go to drain, there's just a leak. So to make a long story short, we're seeing some meters that every month, just the total consumption is going up and up and up and up nearly exponentially. So just bringing it back down to planet Earth here, let's say you have a one inch pipe in an irrigation system.

[00:06:48] And well, I had a thought there. It doesn't even matter what the size is. Let's say there was a leak and it was 10 gallons a minute this month, which equaled some amount of water. And then the next month, we see that the overage equates to 10.5 gallons per minute for the month.

[00:07:12] And what we're seeing is that the size of the overage is growing exponentially. It's not linear. So these potential leaks are getting bigger and bigger or the crack in the pipe or whatever the leak happens to be is growing and growing and growing. And I can't wait to have Paul come on and talk about this in more detail. But in this particular island, the soil is super porous and it's not necessarily going to daylight.

[00:07:42] So these are leaks that no one's ever going to see because it never surfaces. It's either just going down the drain or going down the rock formations back down into the Earth. And so the only way to see it is to look at the consumption and then have some other number, this correlation number, to know whether that amount of water is what should be flowing through that meter per month. And we're seeing this across a number of meters.

[00:08:09] And unless we were looking at this data, it would go unnoticed. And so I think it's kind of interesting that all you got to do first is measure it. Okay. So having a water meter. Awesome. Get a water meter on the source. If you have the opportunity to present to your client, adding a water meter to the irrigation system, present it. And it doesn't have to be framed around one zone losing a sprinkler.

[00:08:39] And I think that's the wrong messaging. Mostly because half the systems can't actually do that. And the other half don't do it right. And they fire false alarms. But I think there's a bigger opportunity. And that is to bring relevancy to the impact that their irrigation system has on their water bill, on their neighborhood, on their city, on their community. Not necessarily the environment, if you will.

[00:09:08] But nobody really knows how much their irrigation system uses in terms of gallons. And then in terms of costs, of course. Because if you can monitor the consumption, let's think about this in terms of the landscape. We don't have bodies in the landscape. We don't have humans consuming the water. But we do have something else consuming the water, right? We've got plants. And in the United States, we have a lot of turf grass.

[00:09:35] And so you can use gallons per square foot per day. And I've talked about this using the slide method. And if you're curious about the slide method, you can go to slide.sprinklernerd.com. And you can use the slide calculator that I've built. And let me come back down to my thought here. To add the occupancy correlation, like is done in buildings, to the landscape,

[00:10:04] we need the square foot of irrigated turf grass. And then how many gallons per square foot should this landscape be using? That's the correlation number. So in this project, I think we're using two gallons per square foot. Well, two gallons per square foot. You'd think I would remember if it's for the day, the week, the month. I can't recall at this very moment. But that's how we're making relevancy of the numbers. So if you simply just have one water meter,

[00:10:34] you can literally buy an analog water meter with the dials on the internet for less than $100. It will work great on your irrigation system. It doesn't have to connect to the controller. Just write down what the number was when you turn on that irrigation system at the beginning of the year. And if you're making monthly or like bi-seasonal site inspections, if you have memberships with your clients when you're on site, go look at the meter and see how many gallons have gone through it.

[00:11:02] And just kind of create, or I would create, like a baseline database for every one of your clients. You know, should they be willing to pay for it? Because nothing's free and this does take time. But then you can kind of walk them through and show them, are you on track this year? Are you using more than you should just in terms of gallons per square per day? Forget precipitation rate. Forget if you have head-to-head coverage. Those are the details. Those will come later. The first thing is, how much are you consuming right now? How much should you be consuming?

[00:11:32] And is that number growing? If it's growing, maybe there's a leak. So anyway, I just kind of had these thoughts on my mind today because it's not something that is, I would say, it might be. So if you're listening to this, maybe you do this. But I don't feel like it's something that's taught in our industry. And it's something that on the surface is really kind of simple. Of course you should know how many gallons you're using. I don't even know why it's not regulated that you got to have an irrigation meter.

[00:12:03] Maybe in some areas it is. And using a digital flow sensor connected to the controller is awesome. But also, there's simpler ways to do it. You don't need to hook up all that technology. You just need a water meter. And you can buy them for less than $100 for a one-inch or three-quarter-inch water meter. And I think there's a lot of value in just having the numbers. And there's certainly many ways to connect them to the cloud and monitor them remotely

[00:12:31] and turn that data into dollars for your clients and turn that data into dollars into savings for you and your business. And so I just kind of wanted to plant that seed, give you something to think about and maybe something you want to share with me. Maybe you've experimented with this type of technology before. Maybe you haven't. Maybe you've got questions. That would be amazing. Would love to hear your questions and your thoughts about just using, you know, old-fashioned water meters

[00:12:59] to record the consumption. And if you have questions about how to come up with your gallons per square foot per day, feel free to reach out. We'd love to connect with you. And you can visit slide.sprinklernerd.com. And, yeah, I'd be happy to share with you some of the reports that we built as well. And it's just kind of exciting because if you can, in this particular project, by the way,

[00:13:27] it's almost $400,000 of leaks year to date. And that's a big opportunity. If you can go in and cut half of that back for your client, that's a $200,000 savings. And we're not talking about making the systems more efficient. We're actually just talking about stopping the leak, fixing the bleeders, finding the bleeders and fixing the bleeders because there's literally just money running down the drain. So there you have it. That's what's going on in my mind today

[00:13:55] with the latest episode of Truck Talk. So thanks for joining me. And stay curious out there, my friends. Nothing better you can do in this world than never be a know-it-all and always be a learn-it-all. So with that, have an awesome, awesome weekend. And I'll catch you on the next episode.