The Pointer UW-Stevens Point Student Newspaper
Wasting water on campus is an area of huge concern. When the irrigation system is seen going off while it is raining, the image the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point has as an eco-friendly campus is damaged.
There are issues with the sprinklers on campus when it comes to wasting water, but the biggest ones may not be what is expected.
Mitchel Deady, senior general resource management major, have harsh opinions of the wastefulness across campus.
“We boast being a green campus, but it’s wasteful,” Deady said, in regard to the sprinklers going off in the rain.
Often times, larger irrigation systems like UWSP’s have rain sensors that detect when it is raining and the system will shut down as a result.
According to Chris Brindley, building and grounds superintendent of facility services, the only sprinkler heads that have such things installed are on the athletic fields. Considering there are between 5,500 and 7,400 sprinkler heads across campus, that is not many with rain sensors.
When asked about the wastefulness of the water through irrigation, Brindley stressed how important reducing water waste is to all of facility services.
“We shoot for one inch of water per week,” Brindley said, whether that is through sprinklers, rain or a combination of both.
The way the sprinklers work is through a system of clocks. There are 26 clocks on campus, each one controlling somewhere between 15 and 24 zones. Each zone can control 12 sprinkler heads at once.
Considering that the goal is one inch of water per week, only one-fifth of that inch is ever distributed at once through the sprinklers, allowing for natural precipitation to fill in the gaps.
If facility services watered on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and Stevens Point happens recieves an inch of rain on Monday; the sprinkler system would be turned off for the whole week, as the water goal has already been reached.
This way, even if the sprinklers are going off at the same time that it is raining, and campus goes over the one-inch goal, it would only ever be by one-fifth of an inch. This is opposed to fulfilling the entire inch of water goal in one night when it is not raining.
The danger then, would be risking whether or not it will rain later in the week, making that whole inch of sprinkler water a waste, regardless of whether it was raining while the sprinklers were running or not.
Facility services has multiple ways of limiting water waste: running the sprinklers over night from 10 p.m.-6 a.m. to limit loss through evaporation and shutting them off as soon as they can if it begins to rain.
Brindley said he agrees that it hurts our image as a sustainable school when the sprinklers are seen going off while it is raining and admits that facility services is not perfect, but they are always trying to reduce waste.
However, there is a different source of water waste that Brindley brought to light which he does not have much control over.
The sprinkler heads are much more wasteful when the heads have been vandalized in some way; the most common cause being the students themselves.
What happens is that the sprinkler heads rise up out of the ground to spray their mist beginning around 10 p.m. and students will kick them off.
“Thursday nights are the worst by far,” Brindley said.
Only one zone of sprinklers is watering at once in any specific area of campus, but each zone contains twelve heads and entire zones will be kicked off in one night. When an entire zone of 12 sprinkler heads is damaged, there is no way to manage the amount of water being spewed out of them, wasting huge amounts.
Brindley said it is most common for two or even three zones, that being 24-36 sprinkler heads, to be damaged in one night. As one zone finishes its cycle, they go back down into the ground and the next will come up, only tempting the same vandals to kick those off as well.
The normal procedure for facility services is to physically check the function of the sprinkler heads about every two weeks, but after the retirement of the full-time irrigation specialist last November combined with school budget cuts, that position has been frozen and facility services is short staffed.
They were unable to dedicate the time to check the system this summer, and relied on protective services doing rounds on campus to alert them of any malfunctions.
This means that vandalized sprinkler heads could have been spewing far more water than that one-fifth of an inch for weeks before someone noticed it and was able to tell facility services about it.
Considering that each sprinkler head costs about $75 to fix, students kicking these heads off is not only wasting huge amounts of water, but also wasting university funds and facility services’ time.
For this reason, it is perhaps better that the system runs primarily on clocks rather than rain sensors because it is possible to shut off the areas with broken heads until they can be fixed.
Facility services is working on improving the amount of water wasted while it is raining, and they hope to improve their technology as they can, but it is careless students who are responsible for far more waste.
Samantha Stein
REPORTER
sstei173@uwsp.edu
