Governor’s Land, Virginia – Landscape Pump Transcription

TRANSCRIPTION

[Intro music plays]

[00:20]

>> LISA SMITH: Governor’s Land Foundation is a homeowner’s association located in Williamsburg, Virginia, consists of 733 homes along with 1,650 acres. Governor’s land is well known in the Williamsburg area for its recreation facilities, such as its walking trails and its recreation lakes. We also have a beach and a marina that is well-used by the community.

One of the goals of Governor’s Land Foundation was to reduce the salinity that was running through our irrigation system-

[Sounds of sprinkler spraying water]

>> LISA SMITH: -along with updating our irrigation system. And we also wanted to become independent from the golf course and have our own pump station.

A lot of our lakes are filled by runoff, so we wanted to somehow develop a plan that we would be able to utilize this water with, again, reducing from taking from a well.

[01:13]

>> LISA SMITH: We hired an engineering firm and they came in to give us some ideas and came up with a plan, which included a transfer line. They wanted $735,000 was our first proposal, so we were actually looking how to do this in three phases over a period of three years before our permit was gonna have to be renewed.

And we were very, very fortunate to bring in Bill Rogers and Watertronics to assist us with being able to develop a water management plan and achieve all of Governor’s Land goals. We are now working basically 30% more efficient, using much less water. We were able to achieve the goal of getting independent from Horns Lake, reducing the salinity, being more efficient with water usage, and I can honestly say in the last six months we have not had a pull from our wells.

And also, being able to probably meet all the requirements for renewing our permit. With Bill’s consulting, it reduced our costs from over $700,000 to about $350,000, and that makes everybody in the community very happy when you save them money because they were special assessed for this, and they are very happy with the end results.

[Music continues]

[02:48]

>> BILL ROGERS: I was hired by the Governor’s Land Foundation to help him with irrigation and water management goals. We did an analysis of the site and determined that they would benefit from a central control system. We chose a Toro Sentinel Central Control system utilizing 27 satellites and central software controlled by radio.

We also added a Watertronics pump station to the system.

[02:48]

>> RICK HEIDVOGEL: So Watertronics has always made superior products. What’s really differentiating us today is our ability to understand the different phases that make up a project. You know, in the design phase, we work very closely with Bill Rogers and his team to solve the application.

Then there’s a construction phase where it requires us to interact with Enviroscapes and work closely with them to make sure that the product gets installed properly. And then we just came out of the optimization phase, which is tuning all the controls and the system to the site specifically.

And then we’re gonna, we’re gonna be in a maintenance phase, which is gonna really allow our pump service network team to be involved in helping maintain our equipment for a long extended period of time.

[04:12]

>> RICK HEIDVOGEL: We’re dealing with an aging infrastructure-

[Sounds of sprinklers spraying water]

>> RICK HEIDVOGEL: -and it varied greatly, um, on the low and the high flow end, and we really needed to understand that and, and understand how the project was going to be irrigated. And so our understanding that allowed us to sit at the table with the designer and appropriately address these issues with the right features.

These unique features include: a higher level of pressure regulation, flow-based pressure regulation, which allows us to assign a pressure set point to a certain flow region. This is important when you’re talking about this aging infrastructure that exists here at Governor’s Land.

We’re able to actually use our patented electronic butterfly valve. This is a very important feature in this pump station because the pump is always, the pump station is always starting against the closed valve. It greatly reduces any chances of water hammer, which is going to extend the life of this very, very large irrigation system.

Other features of the pump station include automatic filtration and level controls. This is all happening at the main pump station, but there’s also transfer pumps with onsite telemetry that is part of this application as well.

So it’s the culmination of all of these devices working together to solve this application. Really allows the water manager to be a water manager.

[Music continues]

[05:51]

>> BILL ROGERS: Because we’re irrigating from ornamental lakes, it’s critical for the water manager at Governor’s land to be able to manage the water in those lakes real time. The Watertronics WaterVision Six software allows him to see exactly how much water is in all of his lakes and determine which lakes need to be refilled from other lakes and how much water is used in the irrigation system.

What’s critical about this is that the homeowners on the lakes want to see the lakes full all the time, and it’s his job to make sure that they don’t dry up.

[06:31]

>> RICK HEIDVOGEL: With all the water management pieces that we are trying to keep control of, Watervision 6 keeps it organized and it’s a central place where a person can go and actually visually see what’s happening with the water resource on the property.

[6:54]

>> BILL ROGERS: One of the challenges on this project was that we had to put the pump station in an existing pump house. The existing pump house was not very large, so I worked with Watertronics and their engineers to come up with a pump station that could be shipped in three or four pieces and assembled inside of a small building.

Watertronics did a fantastic job of helping me understand how to accomplish that goal. The pump station paneled as the size of a refrigerator and it barely fit through the doorway, much less into the pump station. After it was all assembled, it looked like the house had been built around the pump station.

They did a fantastic job.

[07:37]

>> RICK HEIDVOGEL: You know, water management’s talked about a lot in our industry and at Governor’s Land, we’re really doing it. We’re saving water, we’re managing our energy, and we’ve created a very, very efficient solution.

[Outro music plays]