Product Profile: Jan. 1999, Irrigation Design Done Easy

When you're regularly competing against two or three firms for the plum commercial installation jobs, knowing your estimates are accurate and turning your designs around in a hurry is critical to your success.

For Earth Irrigation & Landscaping, McAllen, Texas, three irrigation crews and four landscape crews are kept busy installing new projects throughout the Rio Grande Valley.

Tim Gindele, landscape site engineer for the company, said that it designs about three large commercial installation jobs and five to 10 residential jobs a week. A big factor in the company’s ability to create so many designs is its use of computer design software.

But in addition to time savings generated off of the three computer-aided design stations the company uses, what really matters to Gindele is the software’s ability to provide instant and accurate material take-offs right from a design.

“We can put designs on paper sooner and get accurate take-offs in a snap now,” he emphasized. “That was the target for us because you can’t have a crew get to the job and find out that it doesn’t have the right materials for the job.”

The answer for Earth Irrigation & Landscaping has been the software package RainCAD from Software Republic, Houston, Texas. “RainCAD lets us design complex irrigation systems with multiple water sources, meters or pumps and a large, integrated system with multiple controllers in one continuous drawing,” Gindele noted. “That’s essential for computing the system’s hydraulics, which the software does as well, so you know you have a functioning system.”

The material take-offs are done from the software’s irrigation and landscape material databases, which are standard with the program. “All we had to do was go through the databases and set our prices, then when something is placed on the drawing we click on ‘materials take-off’ and it’s done,” Gindele shared. “The same is true for area take-offs for mulch or ground cover, and it performs labor calculations.”

Every landscape and irrigation system design the company produces comes off of the computer now, which Gindele estimated requires a 30- to 45-day learning curve. “The software is particularly helpful when we’re working with a landscape architect and the design will be revised four or five times,” he added. “A total revision probably only takes four hours compared to an entire week if it’s done on paper.

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