High-Tech Campus Adopts Latest Technology to Reduce Water Use

“WeatherTRAK gives me up-to-the-minute information, with flexibility and customization to best manage my sites with a strong focus on resource conservation.”

— Alex Chavez
Senior Irrigation Account Manager,
BrightView Landscaping

Alex Chavez can rattle off a lot of figures from memory, like the greater than 50% water savings he and his team from BrightView Landscaping achieved for his corporate client. Top minds, recruited from around the world, work on this well-known technology corporate campus in the heart of Silicon Valley. They want a top-tier landscape – one that is beautiful, diverse, and designed to save as much water as possible.

Between 2011 and 2016, California experienced one of the worst droughts in its history. Even before the 2015 imposition of a 25% mandatory water restriction, Chavez’ client responded with design changes to its landscape, including turf removal and a test pilot of WeatherTRAK, a weather-based smart irrigation system. At the time, the client used a mix of traditional timer-based solutions – almost none that were weather-based and none that included dashboards or central management features.

WeatherTRAK provides central management features and dashboards, which allows them to demonstrate compliance with drought mandates. But it was the flexibility of the system that led them to expand their adoption of WeatherTRAK which now covers the majority of their multiple campuses in multiple cities. “WeatherTRAK gives me the most flexibility to manage a vast portfolio of properties”, says Chavez. “Given the diversity of our landscape, it’s great to be able to manage a portfolio of thousands of zones covering millions of square feet with one water management solution.”

Delivery of top-notch customer service is a must for Chavez’ client. “With (alerts received from) WeatherTRAK Mobile, I often know what and where the problem is before stepping onto a site.”

Through a variety of water savings measures, including the implementation of WeatherTRAK, the client reduced potable water use by over 50%. But Chavez and his client continue to pursue even more water savings with technologies like OptiFlow.

With an eye to the future, water management solutions that continue to evolve and enable more savings are critical to Chavez and his client. “I keep a list of features that I would like to see in future versions of WeatherTRAK. Before I had a chance to express these ideas I discovered that the product development team was already working on several of them”, said Chavez.