MARIN COUNTY, Cali. – Richard Restuccia asked attendees at Jain Irrigation’s recent media event to imagine a barista at Starbucks.
The barista assures the customers that they’ll walk out of the store with their 12 ounces of coffee, but first, they need to buy a 24-ounce cup because Starbucks doesn’t know how to pour the coffee into a cup yet. Half of it ends up on the floor and is wasted, but the client still walks out with the 12 ounces they initially wanted anyway.
“We can’t point to another industry where the waste is that bad,” Restuccia said, “but for some reason, for a long time in landscape irrigation, this has been okay. We know the reasons why, and we’re changing that.”
Powered by over a billion pieces of information, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics, Jain Irrigation launched its Jain Unity product last week at a media event in the Bay Area.
JAIN UNITY. Restuccia, the vice president of Water Management Solutions at Jain, walked the media and a handful of area contractors through the benefits of the new irrigation control system. The most obvious perk of the product? Water conservation.
“We’ve all seen this before, that right now in places like California, 60-65% of the water used in an urban area is used for landscape, and 50% or more of that irrigation water is wasted,” Restuccia said. “Of course, we’re all upset about that.”
Restuccia said it’s hard enough for people to know how to program a controller correctly, but then you factor in hourly or daily changes to the weather, and it gets borderline impossible without the right help. Before, he said it was okay to waste the water because it was a plentiful resource, but now the price is skyrocketing to unseen, expensive levels.
Jain Irrigation – in conjunction with ETwater, who first started developing this technology – hopes their new product makes significant changes to the industry. The product is now available to customers, and it lets a user log in and see how much water their plants require, plus a real-time look at how efficient their system is at eliminating water waste.
Based on weather projections, Jain Unity creates a watering schedule that goes through their line of ETwater controllers. Kevin Heverin, the project manager and director of marketing for ETwater, showed attendees at the event how to access the Jain Unity software, which can be viewed on a desktop or laptop computer and a mobile device, which could help someone who’s out in the field.
When a user logs in, the first thing they’ll notice is an alerts system that notifies users where there might be valve issues or leaks on any of their sites, controllers and stations. Commercial sites, he said, usually have between 12 and 48 stations. They use 17 weather variables hourly to adapt their watering schedules, which comes from three different providers, and Heverin said they can add a data source from anywhere within 24 hours. If they wanted to use soil and moisture data from anyone else, they can, though they’re currently utilizing major providers and generally accepted weather sources. The product has virtually unlimited scalability now because of Jain’s investment in the product.
“There’s a lot of information for the contractor,” Heverin said. “You can see rainfall probability, wind range, temperature range – really all sorts of the critical things.”
The sprinkler run time formula traditionally involves an incredibly complicated calculation based on variables like evapotranspiration rates and precipitation rates per hour. So, what have landscapers usually done? Set it and forget it without changing their schedules, so often lawns and properties have gone overwatered.
Restuccia hopes the adaptation of technology like Jain Unity continues to grow. He said controllers sell best in the “smile states,” where East and West Coast landscapers are paying a lot for water and are more willing to quickly embrace smart controllers. The culture of the communities also helps, as areas with people who are consciously thinking about water conservation are more likely to embrace their technology.
“We definitely designed our software…to help increase the demand,” he said. “We should see prices decrease with more demand, more product. I think that once again, this could be a game-changer with Jain Unity. That’s why we’re so excited about it.”
WHO’S WHO? The media event was also used as an opportunity to educate attendees about the history of the Jain brand. Company president Aric Olson said that strategically acquiring irrigation technology companies has helped Jain integrate other technologies into their own systems, creating a holistic package for the clients.
He said that a majority of the startups Jain acquired along the way survived because the product and people were so good. Most startups, Olson said, don’t make it out of three years of service, but many of these companies did. However, at some point, they ran out of money to develop or scale and grow, and that’s when Jain stepped in to acquire those companies.
“You notice that in the last four or five years, (we’ve had) a lot of acquisitions in or around technology,” Olson said. “Our global development team has done a phenomenal job of integrating the best-in-class technologies. We believe we’re a great place to be.”
Most notably at the press event, Olson talked about Jain’s acquisition of ETwater in August of 2018. Among a long line of innovators the company acquired, Olson said ETwater was doing things in the cloud “before we even knew, really, what the cloud was.”
Olson said most all landscapers want to save water. Now, with the technology acquired and developed by Jain, those contractors also know their smart controllers and technology will be around for years down the round, not rendered obsolete after a startup ran out of money.
“We believe technology is the way to do this. We set a path in 2014 to acquire and develop leading technologies, and this has been our roadmap of technology acquisitions,” Olson said. “We’re in the process of taking the best-in-class weather data from ETwater… and our idea is basically, if you’re using ETwater, you’re using autonomous irrigation. Our software team is now bringing some advanced tools, this artificial intelligence, to take this product to the next level.”
