SMART IRRIGATION
Moberly makes adjustments on the weather-based smart control- ler during the auditing stage of the irrigation project.
Moberly and his team have put catch cups out in a grid
around the property and run the zone for 10-30 minutes depending on the sprinkler type. Tey then read the vol- ume of each catch cup, which shows how even the water was put out and the inches per hour. Tis information al- lows the irrigation team to determine ET loss and then formulate what the proper water runtime should be in that given month based on the soil type. Te main goal through the auditing process, Moberly
says, is not only to better manage the irrigation schedule, but to find additional areas of improvement. “When auditing, most people will go there, turn it on
for 20 minutes, program the irrigation for the whole year and may not change it at all,” Moberly says. “But by doing this, we can literally change the irrigation or schedule it every month to maximize efficiencies.” Moberly and his team tackle a couple audits per week
across the project area’s many properties with a goal of completing them all by the end of spring.
Emphasize auditing
Moberly says what separates this project from others is his team’s focus on auditing. He earned his certified landscape irrigation auditor certification through the Irrigation As- sociation at the beginning of the project’s process, which
16 Irrigation & Lighting Summer 2022
he says gave him the knowledge needed to tackle such a difficult endeavor. “Tere’s nobody’s who’s doing the audits in Nashville, and so I think using the audit data is really what takes us to the next level here,” Moberly says. “Tis is what everyone should be doing, it’s just no one has the time to do it.” It is due to the audits that Moberly and his team dis-
covered key variance in pressure. He explains that for some properties, they thought the pressure would be too high and required pressure regulation — when in reality, au- diting showed that it was 30 or 40 psi on a spray head. But across the street, auditing showed that some proper- ties’ spray heads had 60 to 70 psi. In some of those cases, Moberly and his team were left trying to understand what was causing the variations. “Tey definitely fluctuated more than we realized,” he says. By doing hands-on auditing, Moberly learned vital in-
formation about the irrigation systems and their differenc- es. He learned that sometimes when you think a system is fine, the distribution uniformity is 50% and requires work. “It’s been cool to realize the ‘why’ behind the irrigation — stuff that we probably knew, but we didn’t really know why we knew it or how we knew it,” Moberly says. “It’s putting some of the data behind what we’ve been doing without thinking it through.”
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