W

hen water bills at Challenger Park in Parker, Colo., were ringing in at $40,000 a month, it was clear that something had to change. "My boss about fell out of his chair," recalled Parks Supervisor Chuck Klafka.

Part of the problem was that the municipality had designated Challenger as a residential site, rather than commercial. But there was no budging on the issue. So Klafka had to come up with another solution.

The natural-turf soccer field at Challenger Park measures just over 6 acres, one of the larger fields among the four major regional parks that make up Colorado's Douglas County Parks system. Naturally, the field drinks up a lot of water, so Klafka decided to focus on how he could control its water consumption.

Because his area of Colorado has been on water restrictions for more than 20 years—as long as Klafka has been with the County Parks—he and his staff attend seminars every year to find out what the latest gadgets and goods are that will help them achieve their watering goals. Various products are always touted for their various virtues, and for Challenger Park, Klafka was open to anything. "I'll entertain anyone to show me what they've got, and if they can prove to me that it's going to work better than what I've got, then that's great," he said.

With the Challenger situation, he was almost convinced that the best option would be to turn the field into a synthetic surface, but he saw a demonstration of how a WeatherTRAK system could help him both keep his grass and cut costs, he was sold. Klafka had the system installed in late 2005 and said the results were amazing.

"Now we're down to a manageable $15,000 or so a month," Klafka said. "I contribute much of that to that WeatherTRAK clock." Plus, it saved millions of gallons of water that didn't end up as run-off. "You've got to be a good steward of water," Klafka added.

The technology for smart irrigation controllers (also referred to as weather-based controllers) is about 10 years old, explained WeatherTRAK Director of Conservation Tom Ash. What's new is a national performance test that the products go through instigated in 2004 called the Smart Water Application Technology test (SWAT)—"like a how-many-miles-do-I-get-per-gallon type of thing," Ash said.

Plus, the level of perfection that these systems can now achieve has been greatly enhanced. With a traditional controller, a member of the parks staff needs to input the days, the cycle and the soak of the water, but with a smart controller, changes to the schedule are made automatically and include not only the minutes and days of watering, but also the soil type, the plant type, root depth, whether there's sun or shade, the sprinkler type, the slope of the site and more. "Those are the variables that go into an equation that determines how much water a landscape needs," Ash explained. A traditional controller typically only changes the minutes of watering time; it doesn't change things like the watering cycles or the soaking of the soil.