With increased regulations and deeply reduced work staff during the COVID Era, the challenge of managing and maintaining expansive landscapes at college and university campuses has become enormous. But thanks to today’s cloud-based Smart Irrigation technology, landscape managers and field techs are able to work from home to access site maps, check irrigation systems, and receive important irrigation alerts remotely.
Although students have been absent this past year, construction has increased on campuses with new buildings going up, and other projects. Sometimes, irrigation lines can interfere with whatever construction is going on, and the system needs to be shut down. But if the irrigation team isn’t on site, that’s a big problem.
Every now and then, contractors digging on-site might hit an irrigation control wire beneath the ground surface– such as sensitive soil moisture sensors that measure soil moisture content– and knock the irrigation controller off line. This is a huge problem. With no irrigation crew on-site to pinpoint the location of the damage, it could be days or even weeks before it’s even discovered that the irrigation system wasn’t watering in a certain area for quite some time.
With today’s Smart Irrigation technology, landscapers are able to oversee and manage irrigation systems remotely, safely and effectively. Because WeatherTRAK continually transmits information—even when the irrigation system isn’t watering—the irrigation tech watching alerts remotely can go back and look for fresh tracks to locate any problem, figure out what happened, where it happened, and what needs to be fixed.
Want to learn more? Don’t miss hearing from an industry veteran who has successfully kept an 800-acre campus healthy and landscaped during the pandemic in past webinar, Maintaining Healthy Landscapes on a Higher Education Campus During a Pandemic.