Welcome!
About
We partner with water agencies to improve irrigation efficiency at commercial and public sites. We support:
Water Customers
wanting healthy, attractive landscapes with minimal overwatering.
Water Agencies
seeking to improve water system reliability and comply with regulations.
Our Environment
by improving ecological habitats and reducing energy used to transport and treat water supplies.
Where We Operate
Waterfluence is a free service for commercial and public customers supplied by our 30+ partnering water agencies in the Western United States as shown on our service area map.
How We Do It
There is a lot at stake. Overwatering constitutes 1/3 of all water applied to commercial and public landscapes entering our program. The good news is that we consistently see big reductions in overwatering from our monitoring, insights and connections.
Monitor
At the root is your dashboard comparing actual water use to a budget benchmark for each of your sites. The budget is based on real-time weather and site-specific characteristics documented on an editable map.
Insights
We continually look for possible problems stemming from leaks, irrigation scheduling, and sprinkler equipment. As needed we suggest actionable solutions based on our irrigation expertise and rebate opportunities.
Connect
Tap into a network of property managers, HOA board members, in-house maintenance staff, and landscape contractors using our website to share critical information about their organization’s portfolio of sites.
Keys to Success
Although each site is different, our extensive experience over the last 20 years shows we can successfully assist almost every site in at least 1 of 7 ways:
Advances in irrigation technology can improve efficiency, but only if appropriately installed and maintained. Newer model sprinklers can distribute water more uniformly and compensate for higher water pressures. In the field, however, we see that over a quarter of heads are leaking, tilted, clogged, sunken or misaligned.
Weather-based irrigation controllers can automate program schedules to better match weather demands, but when set up using factory default assumptions they are not optimized to a site’s plants, soil, microclimates, and sprinkler/emitter application rates. So while technology can help, motivated and knowledgeable people truly make the difference.
Case: HOA Customer 77% Over Budget Despite Upgraded Controllers
We recently visited an HOA that took advantage of a water agency rebate program to replace three standard Irritroll controllers with weather-based WeatherTRAK ET Pro3 controllers. In the year after installation our monitoring showed water use closely followed the seasonal weather pattern but was 77% over budget.
Closer inspection found:
Low-water shrubs were being irrigated as high-water turf
Actual irrigation precipitation rates were much higher than the default settings
After dialing in appropriate values, water use now closely follows the budget.
Over 95% of our commercial and HOA sites have their irrigation systems managed by landscape contractors. Because contractors do not pay the water bills, they commonly have limited access to meter readings made for billing purposes or hourly reads when advanced meters are installed. We need to share the best water use information available with irrigation contractors to help them successfully monitor what they manage.
Case: Landscape Company Reduces Labor Costs and Gets Better Information
A mid-sized landscape contractor company used to make monthly field reads of their clients’ water meters to monitor and optimize irrigation.
After Waterfluence began its program in the region, the landscape company was able to get:
A 10-year history of past water use and a reliable flow of future reads
Water budgets synced with real-time weather
The landscaper now gets more accurate water budgets and foregoes the labor-intensive process of reading the water meters.
Every site needs an irrigation controller map outlining the areas associated with each of the controller’s stations. Controller maps support appropriate scheduling and system maintenance. For sites using drip technology, a map becomes even more crucial as zones can be difficult to locate after installation.
We find less than half of sites have good controller maps and over time some do not survive landscape contractor turnover. We believe the industry needs to move to online maps that can be edited with mobile devices in the field.
Case: Controller Map Allows Landscape Contractor To Optimize Irrigation
A commercial site did not have a controller map and was running 24 stations by the same number of minutes. Waterfluence helped create an online controller map where the landscaper now knows the landscape areas associated with each station zone.
The landscaper can now:
Measure flow rates in the field and divide by landscape area to calculate the depth of water applied per hour per zone (precipitation rate)
Update landscape areas in the field on a mobile device
After finding differences in precipitation rates among the zones, the landscaper customized zone run times to save water and improve plant appearance.
Efficient irrigation requires containing water pressure in the irrigation system. In general we find sites have too much pressure for spray heads and too little pressure for rotors. Getting the pressure just right can be a challenge depending on the static pressure at the meter, pipe diameters and length, slope, and number and type of sprinklers/emitters, among other factors.
Case: School Improves Playfield for Children
We helped a school optimize the pressure in their playground irrigation system. At the meter static pressure was an adequate 80 PSI. We found, however, that dynamic pressure while operating the irrigation system dropped below 30 PSI leading to poor water distribution.
Upon inspection, we were able to improve dynamic pressure to an acceptable 50 PSI by:
Fixing leaks
Installing lower water using nozzles in the sprinkler rotors
With improved sprinkler uniformity the school’s fields became safer and more enjoyable for children to play on without using more water.
Although plants have over half of their mass in roots, soil is often overlooked as the base of efficient irrigation. To encourage deep, wide root profiles, irrigation should be as infrequent as possible and deep enough to fill the root zone to its water holding capacity. Water applied should be cycled to not exceed soil infiltration rates, especially on slopes.
Appropriate use of mulch can moderate soil temperatures and water losses. Soil salinity can be managed with periodic irrigation leaching, especially when applied waters are higher in salts.
Case: Soak Cycles to Reduce Runoff
Waterfluence recently conducted a field survey at a commercial site that had landscape on a slope using standard spray heads. The summer runtimes were 12 minutes. We found water was running down into the parking lot within 4 minutes given the slope and high application rate.
The site changed its scheduling to:
3 soak cycles of 4 minutes to allow water to percolate
This has allowed the plants to get all of the targeted water and the site owner to avoid expensive repairs to the parking lot from water damage caused by the runoff.
While our focus is to efficiently irrigate whatever plants exist in the landscape, we encourage the transition to native and climate-adapted plants. After getting established, natives tend to need less water and better complement the local ecosystem. We are alarmed, however, to see that low-water using plants are frequently the most overwatered plants in the landscape because of the continuation of traditional irrigation practices.
Case: LEED-Platinum Design is Not Sufficient
A large high-tech company at a LEED-Platinum site recently redeveloped their landscape with all low-watering using plants. A large section of the landscape was planted with a low watering (WUCOL 0.1 to 0.3), no-mow, creeping red fescue grass.
However, the landscape company:
still irrigated the native grass as if it was a typical lawn
So even when landscapes are designed with thoughtful principles and ordinances, real change requires ongoing behavioral adjustments by irrigation managers.
Reducing overwatering leads to lower customer water bills. In many areas that we operate the cost of water has been increasing much faster than inflation. Water reductions, however, usually require investment in new irrigation controllers, irrigation distribution systems, or landscape design.
Case: Valley Water
Valley Water is one of our sponsoring agencies providing wholesale water supplies to almost 2 million people in the Silicon Valley. Water efficiency is an essential component of their long-run management strategy as expressed by their generous financial incentive programs.
One large commercial site recently received over $30,000 to support:
Replacement of high-water-using turfgrass with native plants
Replacing spray heads with drip irrigation
Waterfluence has monitored over a 50% reduction in water use at the site.
Waterfluence Supports
