Lesmurdie Senior High School

With sporting grounds that extend 20,000 square metres, including various garden beds and lawn areas – maintaining our extensive irrigation requirements on an outdated manual system was a real challenge.

The sports oval was operating on a stand-alone controller of 11 zones, which controls the application of mains water supplied from a 90,000-litre storage tank. While the gardens and lawn areas were irrigated by 29 individual battery-operated controllers fitted to mains water taps.

Birdseye view of the Lesmurdie High School grounds.

Operating all these controllers was a manual process.  Each had to be programmed to water at separate times from one another, as more than 2 controllers running in the same area would cause low-pressure issues. It also made our 2-day-a-week watering requirements hard to comply with. Adjusting the programs to suit various weather changes was very labour intensive and proved almost impossible.

Using multiple stand-alone controllers meant numerous connections, which over time, started to corrode and leak.

Making irrigation easy

Irrigation accounts for around 80% of our water use. Sporting grounds can be a large unnoticed consumer of water due to early watering times. Upgrading to a new irrigation system has provided us with better visibility of our water use and potential real water savings.

Graph showing the water savings over the billing period. Note that the P1 billing period comparison was expected to be minimal during the winter sprinkler switch off when the water use at school is low.

“With the old battery standalone system, I had a piece of paper and a pen that I would take around to each controller to record the new programs each season or weather change. Now with the automation if temperature, rain, or wind changes, the programs are altered on the spot. It’s like someone is standing next to the controller 24/7.”  – Jeff Lever, School Gardener

How we did it

Water Corporation was able to assist us with a subsidy package through the Water Efficient Public Schools Program.

We installed a central control system that connects all irrigation zones throughout the school, including the oval. It now allows our programming to be carried out from a single point.

A two-wire irrigation system was chosen. This ensured all valves could be easily joined to the central controller through a decoder connected to each valve. The decoder was assigned an operating address, which the central control can recognise and operate the valves. An example can be seen in the image from the Hydrawise application below.

We moved from a manual map identifying our irrigation requirements to an online application, where each zone is now displayed and operated from a smartphone/computer in real-time.

The layout of the station within the Hydrawise application showing an image of each location. By seeing each location, we can edit the program remotely or on-site.

Enabling efficient irrigation practices

The new control system provides many benefits:

• programming can be adjusted in a matter of minutes, not hours
• minimises water use when testing irrigation
• ability to monitor local weather stations and automatically adjust each watering zone according to real-time weather conditions – resulting in real water savings going in and out of the winter and summer seasons.

The central control system also has a flow management program. It monitors water flow and pressure from the main water storage tank that supplies irrigation to the oval. It can detect anomalies that may indicate a leak or a damaged or stolen sprinkler head. The controller will automatically shut down the problem zone and move on to the next zone.

Monitoring our water use

We can view and compare our current and historic watering use against temperature and rainfall records at any time. Having this data provides us with valuable benchmarks, so we can work to further improve our irrigation practices.

Comparison graphs showing our current and historical water use against temperature and rainfall records.

What we’re doing now

We continue to work closely with Water Corporation to reduce our scheme water use, sharing data collected by the new irrigation system.

We’re looking to extend the use of the central control system to monitor and control all of our irrigation requirements, including the interaction of local weather stations to assist with programming.

By upgrading our irrigation and establishing a native planting program, we expect real water reductions and financial savings for the school.