You know ET based irrigation controllers can save money by reducing water usage. Does your customer get it? Probably not.
Your customer is not interested in a 30 minute education about irrigation controllers. So, how can you explain the benefit of ET based controllers in less than 2 minutes? Relate it to something they are familiar with.
Everyone understands why you set your thermostat to control the temperature in their home. Use that as your example. Your conversation might go something like this;
“Old style irrigation controllers are set to run at a certain time of day for a certain number of minutes. They irrigate according to the set times whether you need it or not. Imagine running your heat and air conditioning based on set run times instead of the temperature in your house.
The new irrigation controllers can sense the weather conditions in your yard and only irrigate when and how much is necessary. Just like how your thermostat only runs your A/C when it needs to. So, basically they are like a thermostat for your irrigation system.
Bottom-line is you’ll save about 25% of the water used in a typical irrigation season. For your house that would be about $200 per year. Which means you pay off the cost in less than 2 years and pocket the savings for many years to come.”
The actual savings obviously is more for larger properties and less for smaller ones. The $200 is calculated on a ¼ acre (10,890 ft2) irrigated area at a water cost of $2.75 per ccf.”
