Less Time in the Truck, Millions of Gallons of Water Saved:

How One School District Achieved Sustainability at Scale

How Prince William County School District turned an unmanageable irrigation problem into a district-wide sustainability win — water, dollars, and time the district now has for better things than waste.

“Not only are we being good stewards of taxpayer dollars — we’re protecting a resource that, even in Northern Virginia, has become a critically important commodity. Smart irrigation lets us say we’re doing our part, both financially and environmentally.”

— Bryan Conrad, Energy Education Coordinator, Prince William County School District

Playgrounds, sports turf and building landscapes across a school district all use a lot of water — and the needs are rarely one-size-fits-all. Through tighter visibility and control over leaks, overwatering, and other non-productive use, smart irrigation saves water, money, and time.

Prince William County School District’s experience shows what that looks like in practice, and the challenges behind it show up in school districts, parks departments, and municipalities nationwide. Learn more at pwcs.edu.

The Problem

Managing outdoor irrigation at a school district sounds straightforward. In practice, it’s anything but.

Prince William County School District oversees 100 schools, 60 of which have controllers, and 150 sports fields spread across a large Virginia county. For years, one person — irrigation technician Anders Wilkinson — was responsible for all of it. No real-time visibility. No remote access. Just a truck, a phone, and a prayer that nothing had broken over the weekend.

The day-to-day reality looked like this:

• Broken pipes could run for days undetected — one burst over a long holiday weekend flooded a sports field so badly the crew joked they “needed a canoe” to reach it on Tuesday morning.
• Irrigation systems ran in the rain because the old timer-based controllers had no weather awareness.
• Water bills arrived two to three months late — by the time a problem was spotted, it was already history.
• A site visit to the other side of the county could eat most of a workday just in driving time.
• Parks & Recreation staff and school employees — not irrigation experts — were the district’s unofficial early warning system.

For the person in the field, this was the whole job: one set of hands, dozens of sites, and no way to know something had failed until water was already pooling on a field or someone picked up a phone to complain. Every leak that ran undetected was time that couldn’t be recovered and money that was already gone.

“There were fields that were watering too much, broken pipes we didn’t know about. We’d rely on mowers and Parks & Rec staff to monitor the fields — and we wouldn’t know about a problem for several days.”

– Anders Wilkinson, Mowing and Irrigation Crew Chief, Prince William County School District

The gap was just as frustrating one floor up, where the district’s energy and sustainability staff were trying to track utility data. Water bills that arrived months after the fact made it impossible to respond to waste while it was happening — or to show real progress against conservation goals. They were always reporting on the past instead of managing the present, and by the time a problem turned up on paper, the water and the dollars were long gone.

The Turning Point

In 2018, Bryan Conrad — the district’s Energy Education Coordinator — walked out of a meeting at the Kelly Leadership Center, a district facility publicly committed to sustainability and noticed the irrigation running in a downpour. He thought: there must be a smarter way to do this.

A conversation with Anders confirmed that weather-based smart irrigation technology existed. A few weeks later, Bryan walked into the department head’s office and found a turf management magazine open to an article about smart controllers on the desk. That was the green light.

What happened next is worth paying attention to for anyone who has ever had to build the case for new technology inside their own organization. The district didn’t ask for a district-wide budget on day one. The sustainability team funded a small pilot out of the energy department’s own budget — a low-risk way to let the technology prove itself before anyone committed to a full rollout.

“Getting the buy-in on this technology was the easiest I’ve ever done. Once Anders and I started talking about it, it was clear this was the direction we needed to go.”

— Bryan Conrad, Energy Education Coordinator, Prince William County School District

That sequence — start small, let the data make the argument, then use early results to earn support for expansion — became the template for everything that followed.

The Solution

The district selected WeatherTRAK smart irrigation controllers — including the LC+, ET Pro3, and OptiFlow XR — deployed and managed through HydroPoint’s cloud-based platform. WeatherTRAK uses local weather data and ET (evapotranspiration) calculations to water only when and how much each site actually needs, automatically adjusting based on rain, temperature, and soil conditions.

Phase 1: The Pilot (2018)

The pilot launched at the Kelly Leadership Center and a cluster of nearby schools — manageable, high-visibility, and geographically tight. Almost immediately, WeatherTRAK surfaced problems the team didn’t know existed: valve faults, wire nicks, weeping valves, and slow leaks that had been quietly wasting water for months. For the first time, Anders could detect a fault from his phone, remotely shut down a zone, and respond — without ever leaving his desk. Faults and flow anomalies now showed up as alerts before anyone called to complain, and the long drives across the county to check on a hunch largely disappeared.

Phase 2: Staged District-Wide Expansion (2018-2023)

As pilot results caught the attention of the District’s Superintendent’s Advisory Council on Sustainability, funding was approved for a phased rollout:

• Elementary schools first — highest need, most known issues, best place to learn.
• Middle schools next — refining workflows and building internal expertise.
• High schools in 2023 — the most complex sites, with large athletic fields and Athletic Directors who were initially skeptical about handing over irrigation control.

By the time high schools came online, the team had five years of data, proven results, and the credibility to address pushback head-on. The Athletic Directors who were most resistant? Over time, they became the program’s biggest advocates — because their fields improved once overwatering was eliminated.

“In two seconds, he rain-paused all 75 controllers. Back in the old days, we’d drive around with a crew and manually shut them off because we didn’t trust the old rain sensors. Now it’s just a click.”

— Shane Young, Landscape Management Coordinator, Prince William County School District

The shift went deeper than convenience. With real-time visibility, the team could finally manage water as it was being used rather than reading about it months later on a bill. They could track savings, generate reports, and demonstrate measurable progress toward conservation goals — the kind of audit-ready data that earns recognition from leadership and justifies the next round of investment.

It also changed how the district plans new work. Rather than retrofitting smart control onto sites after the fact, weather-based irrigation is now designed in from the start — specified by default on new builds and major renovations, so every new field and landscape is built to be managed intelligently on day one.

The Results

As of June 2025 — seven years after the first pilot controller went in — the picture is clear. The program has saved more than $1.3 million in water costs and conserved over 120 million gallons across 61 metered sites, with 75 WeatherTRAK controllers now running at 65-plus schools.

These aren’t soft environmental wins — they’re a hard financial return with audit-ready data behind them, hitting conservation goals and budget goals at the same time. That combination is what gets a program recognized, funded again, and replicated elsewhere. And the value compounds beyond the line item: every dollar not lost to a hidden leak stays in the operating budget, and grounds that are watered correctly rather than drowned hold their condition over time.

Those savings didn’t plateau — they kept growing. Even as Virginia experienced drought conditions through 2024 and precipitation dropped below average, the district’s water savings increased. That’s what weather-based irrigation intelligence does: it applies water precisely when it’s needed, which matters most when water is scarce.

The district also extended WeatherTRAK to sites on wells and cisterns — locations with no water bills to reduce — because the remote management capability and operational visibility alone were worth the investment.

“We should have done this a long time ago. If you’re considering it — just go for it. Bryan had a lot of faith in it, and it paid off.”

— Anders Wilkinson, Mowing and Irrigation Crew Chief, Prince William County School District