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The incentive to save water
Company solves the problem of getting the necessary people motivated to conserve
Steve Marcus
David Drake, CEO of ICC Monitoring, says the control boxes at Canyon Gate save water and give notice of leaks in the irrigation system and of broken sprinkler heads.
Monday, July 27, 2009 | 2 a.m.
TECH IS ONLY PART OF THE PICTURE: ICC Monitoring uses sophisticated monitoring devices to help communities such as Canyon Gate save water, but the key part of its service is countering the incentives organizations and their employees might have not to make conserving water a priority. There's no upfront cost for the company's service and its fees come out of customers' savings.
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Beyond the Sun
Canyon Gate
If someday Las Vegas should die, not burned like Troy or buried like Pompeii, but abandoned like Angkor, just left like an old Plymouth by the side of the road, well, if that should happen, someday some archaeology grad students are going to wind up in the gutters of Canyon Gate.
They’ll describe how the gutters are pocked and channeled by erosion. Stains will hint and laboratory tests will confirm that algae once grew in the gutters. People will marvel at their findings, appalled. In a baking desert that receives 4 to 5 inches of water a year, they built a city of 2 million people and then watered their lawns so much that scum grew in the gutters? No wonder it went bust.
But that’s history as it might not have to be written. Right now, Las Vegas is alive, surviving if not thriving, and Canyon Gate is an inhabited upscale gated neighborhood with a waterfall out front and green lawns inside. And though its gutters are indeed eroded and algae stained, what’s really interesting is what you don’t find in the gutters:
Water. For the past seven months, though the grass, trees and shrubs are all still alive and well, Canyon Gate’s gutters have been mostly dry. To find out why, lift your eyes from the gutter. Look atop the western gate house and you’ll see a white box topped with a wind speed meter, one of the twirling ones that looks like it’s made from pingpong ball hemispheres.
This is part of a watering control package designed by David Drake, whose company, ICC Monitoring, is doing something that no one else does in Las Vegas. It is — and this is all ICC does — monitoring water use.
But let’s back up for a minute.
Here’s how commercial landscaping in the valley generally works, as explained by J.C. Davis, spokesman for the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
You have, on the one side, a customer such as an HOA or a business and then on the other side, you have a landscaping company. The customer pays the water bill and pays a landscaper to keep the plants alive. And so you have a system in which, subtly and without any nefarious intent, the landscaper is encouraged to overwater. After all, if customers are happy with green plants, the easiest way to avoid angry phone calls and multiple trips to the property is to overwater.
Is it a waste? Sure, but it’s not the landscaper’s water bill.
Not every landscaper does this, Davis says, but it’s common. The water authority is trying to stop the overwatering with the only tools at its disposal: It can hit the HOAs or businesses with water waste fines and raise water rates, it can send letters to landscapers telling them they are risking the business by putting their clients in danger of said fines, and it can offer landscapers classes and certificates in water management in the hope that customers will select the certified landscapers.
The water authority is trying all of these approaches, but it is not easy to be sure they’re talking to the right people, Davis says.
For instance, the guy who owns the landscaping company might not be managing the company and the guy managing the company might not be the gardener setting the watering timers — but to make the guy setting the timers care, you have to make his boss care, and to make him care you have to make the owner care.
On the other side, the person who negotiates landscaping contracts might not be the person who pays the water bill and the person who pays the water bill might not be paying with his own money.
It is “a tough little communication nut to crack,” Davis says.
Now David Drake found out about this from another direction. He spent 11 years designing sophisticated watering controllers for Motorola — adding sensors, automating the controllers’ responses, adding new parameters to adjust — and then one day he left the corporate office to go on a field call with a landscaping company. He had an epiphany: He had been designing increasingly complex machines to be used by people who are, to put it gently, not themselves engineers.
Actually, Drake had a second epiphany: He hated working in a cubicle.
He thought: Why not start my own business, managing water by getting in between clients and landscaping companies? I wouldn’t be pushing anyone out, it’s just an empty space, and I would get outdoors.
To overcome skepticism — the sentiment of: I already have a landscaper, what do I need to pay another guy for? — he would have clients pay for the sensor installation with their water authority rebate checks and then pay a monthly fee that’s a percentage of the savings from their old water bill. In other words, he can tell them, “It won’t cost you any money. It will save you money.”
Canyon Gate is ICC’s pilot project and from February through June, it has saved 7.3 million gallons and cut the water bill by more than $20,000, compared with the same period last year. Percentage-wise, that’s savings of 37 percent and 45 percent, respectively.
We asked the community manager for Canyon Gate, Scott Jaegel, how the pilot program is working out from his perspective.
“If this is any indication of what’s to come, well, then we’re very pleased,” Jaegel said.
Discussion: 13 comments so far…
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If SNWA were serious about water conservation, they'd do this all over the valley!
As we all know,the one sure way to conserve is not to plant items that simply are not native to the region. After all this is a desert.This is a no brainer. Secondly "band" vegetation you know to be water wasters.The unexpected bonus to all this is...a reduction in allergies from all the vegetation brought in and planted that wasn't there before.But it all goes back to the elected officials.They should be putting enormous pressure on the state to pass stricter regulations.
The reporter's lead-line reads like "It was a dark and stormy night..."
Save this one for the Christmas party...
The horrid excessive verbosity of this article no doubt caused wasteful use of newsprint. Newsprint is very water dependent in its creation. Better writing reduces water consumption. This story could have been handwritten on a 1x1 stickie.
LV doesn't have a supply problem. It has a pricing problem. For some reason, Nevada continues to operate on the basis of the free lunch syndrome. It's worked for decades with tourism paying most of our taxes and costs of living here. But Mother Nature offers no such bargains. Price water for what it's worth. It's true cost. If economic development is so darned critical, then price water to ensure that what water Nevada has for legitimate urban development is appropriately charged for and used! Besides, although the option has been poo-poo'd, I'd still like to see the numbers on LV getting San Diego's water from the Colorado. Then replace that water for San Diego by buying them an ocean water de-salinization plant (with salt sludge disposal built in).
This is a good thing.
No, no, Carson Hound, you can dream and dream about a desal plant in Cali, but it ain't gonna' happen. First of all, the Cali Coastal Commission is a major roadblock to desal. The state is in desperate need for water in its Central Valleys, but the last time I checked, the only desal plant was a "demonstration" one in Santa Barbara that I doubt is still working. Why? Because La La land is worried about the fishies and the crabbies being harmed. Your idea has merit, but we're talking about the land of fruits and nuts, and it ain't gonna' happen...
@CarsonNewsHound- A desalination plant cost Tampa about $200 million. It provides 25 million gallons per day, or about 10% of the water for Tampa and the surrounding county. San Diego is 3 times as large as Tampa. So to meet San Diego's needs, the outlay would be $6 billion. I think that's a little more than we have to spend for water projects, for the next century.
Desalinization would be great, worse ideas have been implemented! San Diego, Los Angeles, and a great deal of the state's population sits right next to the largest body of water in the world, yet they're still using melted snow water tracked across hundred miles of desert.
Eventually water will become too expensive to have swimming pools and green lawns all year long. Desalinization soounds like a good bet. It just has to be made cost effective.
Hey Brendan >>>>> I did not see one word in your letter about the biggest water wasters in clark county and that is the 50 golf courses that we have here but i guess that the SOUTHERN NEVADA WATER AUTHORITY dos not have the juice in county or state government to tell the hotel bosses that there guest can't bring there golf clubs here anymore. RIGHT! (LETS START WITH THAT THEN LATER WE CAN WILL WORRY ABOUT THE SWIMMING POOLS)
By slots,
Desalinization would work of course, but with the figures you supply for Tampa the state of California would have to build plants for about $250 billion. California will have to build some, and very soon as well, what with the snow packs and glaciers melting, within a few decades they wont be getting much water from that source. Lake Mead is going lower and lower on water, soon too little to generate electricity.
On the link where one can find the useage of water, it shows some areas well over 200000 gallons a year for single households.
Are these true figures or some fantasy figures.