Landscape Cerification List

| Certification Criteria | Group 1 | Group 2 | Group 3 |

Certification Criteria

How We Evaluate Performance

Evaluation Development

The MWDOC member agencies formed an ad-hoc committee consisting of those agencies that are active in the Landscape Performance Certification Program. The committee meets regularly to review all the elements of the program. One of the tasks the group decided to review was the certification process of the program. Below we list the parameters that have been developed in order to evaluate all the sites in the program and their performance.

Ground Rules

Certification is awarded to a site that has shown an acceptable level of performance on some or all of its meters. We evaluate each meter for every site. Every quarter we run our evaluation queries to determine if a site is still performing. Evaluation takes into account the past 12 months of performance.

In order to get a meter as close as possible to the budget, three factors must apply: 1) The system’s distribution uniformity (DU) should be at 62.5% or better; 2) The landscape contractor should have access to the LPCP to monitor performance and should be in control of the irrigation timers’ programming; and 3) Every month, the property manager/owner should work with the landscaper to bring the meter(s) consumption close to budget.

When evaluating performance, we rely strictly on the performance reports already posted on the website. We do not make subjective evaluations or give preference to any site listed. We only include those sites that are currently participating in our program and their respective companies.
We then simply run a series of queries from the performance reports to tally how many meters each site has and how close to the budget those meters are performing. To accomplish this, we list the sites that meet the performance criteria in three groups 1 to 10 meters per site; 11 to 50 meters per site and 51 meters and over. The combined consumption divided by the combined budget will tell us how far from the budget the site is performing. To qualify for evaluation, each meter for every site should meet the following criteria:

1. The meter and account number you provided us should match the meter/account number combination that we get from the water service company.
   
   
2. Each meter should have an accurate area measurement of the landscape it irrigates via the irrigation controller(s). A meter with an excessive discrepancy between the area in our records and the real irrigated area will show numbers far off from the calculated monthly budget. These meters will never have a chance to make to the list. You may want to re-measure the area on those meters that are showing excessive savings or that are constantly over-watering.
   

Evaluating Performance

After grouping these sites by number of meters, we acknowledge those sites for which their meters that have stayed as close as possible to the budget over the past 12 months. Successful sites will fall between these ranges:

1. For any given group, we will calculate the median (M) ratio between usage and budget.

2. We will establish a floor of -45% from the budget. The ceiling will be calculated by comparing the median from our 20% standard. If (M) is larger than the +20%, then (M) becomes the ceiling, if not, our ceiling will remain the +20% from the budget.

3. On group 1, we list the sites that have only one meter starting from the bottom of the list. Those sites with 2 up to 10 meters per site are ranked by performance level from the top of the list, the top performer showing up at the top.

4. On group 2, we list those sites which at least 15% of their meters are performing within the parameters established on point 2 above. The best performer shows at the top of the list.

5. On group 3, we do the same as in group 2.

Final note: we do not post the actual percentages or number of meters per site since we consider these details to be sensitive information. If you have questions as of how we calculated your specific site’s performance, please contact Julio Sánchez, program manager, at Julio@econservision.com to request a review and explanation of your numbers.