Tag: irrigation

Money-Saving Irrigation Shutdown

You may notice that nothing is being watered in the Rio Crossing common areas, and we thought you might want to know what’s going on.

The water to the grass has been off for several weeks, as the winter grass never came back up.  A decision was made not to over-seed the summer-Bermuda grass with winter-Rye grass, so watering the dormant Bermuda isn’t necessary.

We had been continuing to water shrubs and trees into the cold season, but there have been a large number of leaks in the irrigation system, and our water bills were extremely high for a few months, especially after the storm damage that occurred in July.  As of the end of October, our landscape vendor had removed all the dead trees and repaired irrigation system damage from the storm, but we know some additional irrigation problems remain.

At the January 2018 board meeting, a decision was made to shut off all of the irrigation system (except for the flowers at the entrance monuments) for a few weeks while we get proposals from irrigation/landscape vendors to do a “water audit” – helping us to determine what our water bills should be, given the number of trees and shrubs, and amount of grass area.  Since it’s still technically “winter season”, the shrubs and trees don’t require constant watering, and the amount of money saved on wasted water (the stuff that flows down the gutters or just makes puddles in the sand where there are no plants) will help pay for the water audit.

The plan was to turn the water on after a few weeks, but we got some rain earlier this week (about a third of an inch), so we’ll leave the water off for the moment.  The Board and Landscape Committee will continue to evaluate the irrigation needs and make adjustments as needed.  In the meantime, we’re saving around a thousand dollars a week in water costs.