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28 December 2010

Whittlesea sporting grounds are benefiting from a revolutionary watering system that remotely monitors and controls water intake on ovals across the municipality.
Known as the Irrinet system, the high-tech program was developed in the harsh, dry climate of Israel and is an effective and efficient watering option for public gardens, parks and sports grounds.
Under the system, each ground’s daily water requirements are calculated from a central computerised weather station at the council’s Epping works depot in Houston St. Gathering data from a remote satellite at each site, the computer system tracks weather, rainfall and evaporation rates for the grounds to determine if watering is needed to maintain the turf. It then automatically sets nightly watering times for them.
But, unlike other systems, it also has the intelligence to automatically cancel orreduce a watering session if it rains at the ground.
Before this, grounds operated on their own set timer that would water the ground for the same period each day regardless of weather conditions.
Council infrastructure technology director Neill Hocking said the system had cut water consumption at the grounds by a third, and was being closely monitored by other councils.
“It has been very successful and council’s set-up is used as a demonstration model for other municipalities,” he said.
The fully-automated Irrinet system was installed in 2004 at a cost of $415,000 and is used at all of the council’s sporting grounds and on some landscaped areas.
It can be remotely controlled suburbs away by a single laptop used by the council’s parks and gardens department.
Mr Hocking said the system was just one of several initiatives designed to cut water consumption in half by 2030.
These included extending a pipeline from one of its water-treatment plants to several sporting grounds and school ovals in Epping North, the installation of an ultra-violet filtration system to water the Redleap Reserve in Mill Park with recycled water from Peter Hopper lake and plans to capture excess water from Melbourne Wholesale Markets when it relocates to Epping in 2011.