Benefits:
The Municipal Water District of Orange County’s Landscape Performance Certification Program provides you with a FREE water management tool to help you and your customers:
- Easily track irrigation water use
- Reduce water bills
- Improve the health, appearance, and value of landscapes
- Protect the environment by decreasing urban runoff
- Maintain compliance with NPDES requirements
- Identify those accounts that are over-watering for further discussion with the landscape contractor.
Two Simple Questions:
1) Do you know how much your customer paid for water used to irrigate landscapes during the past month?
2) Do you know how much your customer SHOULD HAVE paid for water used to irrigate landscapes during the past month?
The Landscape Performance Certification Program gives you the right answers to both these questions, month after month, at NO COST to you or your customers.
How It Works:
The Landscape Performance Certification Program creates a loop of accountability between the Property Owner/HOA Board, the Property Manager, and the Landscape Contractor. A customized water budget is created for each irrigation meter using:
1. Data from Your Customer’s Site
- We take certain basic information from the property, such as contact information, location, and irrigated landscape area for each dedicated irrigation water meter, and store this information on our secure webpage for your viewing only.
2. Consumption Data from the Water Retailer
- Every month, the water retailer sends us a download of the consumption for all the irrigation accounts.
3. Data from Weather Stations
- We receive a daily data download from three weather stations in Orange County. This data download contains weather information for three regions: a coastal band; a central band; and a foothill band. Contained within this information is an “index” number known as the Evapotranspiration (ETo).
Evapotranspiration: The combined process of both evaporation from the soil and transpiration through plant foliage.
4. Putting It All Together
- We then create a water budget for the site. This budget is an estimate of the annual, monthly, or weekly water requirements for a specific irrigation meter, and is calculated by combining two formulas (one for turf and one for shrubs and all other non-turf irrigated plant material).
Certification:
We will promote your company depending on your level of participation and how well your sites are performing according to the estimated water budgets. Visit our certification section to see if your company is already in our system or not.
Sample Screen Shots
How to Enroll
Request a Site Data Form
If you’ve seen enough and are ready to sign-up, contact us to request a Site Data Form.
Please contact Adriana Villalba at (949) 940-8141, or via e-mail at [email protected], to request a meeting or the Site Data Form.
Or, request a FREE meeting with our staff
Still have questions about how the program works? Contact us, and we will gladly meet with you to explain the program and how to enroll your sites. We can customize the meeting from a casual discussion to a 30 minute Power-Point presentation. You may even want to invite the landscaper(s) that work with you on the sites you manage. If you manage an HOA, we can also meet with the board of directors to present the program to them. And we’ll even bring free gifts – a soil probe and a copy of the book Landscape Management for Water Savings.