Partner Spotlight:
Paul Schultz, CIC, CLIA
Novato, California

As a senior irrigation specialist for Cagwin & Dorward, a landscape maintenance company in Northern California, WaterSense irrigation partner Paul Schultz (CIC, CLIA) works to improve irrigation efficiency for the company’s customers and to educate them on how to maintain a beautiful landscape without wasting water. Schultz regularly performs initial site inspections when his company is contracted by customers with existing irrigation systems. These customers primarily include shopping centers and homeowners associations, in addition to a few apartment complexes and corporate campuses. After inspecting the sites, Schultz provides the customers with a list of immediate repairs, along with pictures of their system and a letter communicating ways they can reduce water waste. Schultz works as part of a team at Cagwin & Dorward that strives to improve water efficiency in the landscape maintenance industry.

To help customers save the most water and money, several water utilities in Northern California offer rebates to commercial or residential customers who install smart irrigation controllers or decrease the water demands of their landscape. If a customer’s water utility offers rebates, Schultz helps to coordinate a review of the site by the utility to identify rebate opportunities. Additionally, his company attempts to explain to customers the value in making upgrades to improve the efficiency of their irrigation system in terms of potential savings on their water bills. They give customers an estimate of potential cost savings from upgrades such as switching to pressure-compensating nozzles, adding a sprinkler head to a hot spot instead of simply increasing the run time of the system, or installing a smart controller to water only when necessary.

To increase his company’s qualifications in water efficiency, Schultz helped to develop an in-house water management training for the company’s landscape maintenance managers on how to program an irrigation controller based on current evapotranspiration (ET). To design the training, his company created month-by-month irrigation schedules based on reports from the California Irrigation Management Information System (CIMIS) database and site water audits to use at a number of test sites throughout the company. The landscape maintenance managers use the schedules to program their controller at a test site based on water conservation methods. The data collected allows the company to compare water use from this year to last through water utility records.

In general, the company expects this program to decrease water use by 20 to 30 percent if the controllers are programmed properly. Schultz explains a positive trend toward water efficiency in the landscape irrigation industry: “In today’s environment, often a property’s second largest expenditure is for irrigation watering. With costs continuing to go up and water restrictions taking place, landscaping professionals are being asked to help reduce these costs while maintaining the quality and value that the landscape adds to our customers’ sites. And we are doing it, to our own amazement!?”