Epiphanies and efficiencies

Company: Aqua Trac
Founded: 2007
Location: Litchfield Park, Ariz.
Service mix: 100% irrigation consulting
Customer mix: Primarily commercial

Jim Kauth, president of Aqua Trac, shares the epiphany he had that led him to start an irrigation consulting company.

I was working on a property trying to lower the water usage, and it was 115 degrees out. We were trying to figure out a way to lower the water costs. That’s when I had the epiphany that this is what I should be doing all the time. I was a landscape designer and contractor. That property that I was working on was a large residential property. I own it now and actually live here.

I then learned everything I could learn about water conservation. I did all the classes, got all the certifications and all that stuff, but nobody wanted to hire me to save them water because water was cheap. The breakthrough in my business happened when the water rates in the Southwest went through the roof. Everybody came to see me because they needed to save money.

I came up with a way to raise the efficiency of an irrigation system and programming in a way where I could really lower the amount of water usage, but at the same time keep the plant life thriving. I started doing experiments on landscaping to see how much water I needed. Today, we are much more technical and use satellite data to help us determine if the landscape is receiving the correct amount of water.

For irrigation companies, I would say you should be inspecting every controller every month. If you can raise the efficiency of the irrigation system through inspections, you can lower the water costs by 25 percent.

My motto is, ‘People don’t do what you expect; they do what you inspect.’ We train these irrigation techs to inspect their own irrigation and how to make the repairs. We offer free training for any irrigation tech, and they can come to our training classes twice a year.

Overall, we’re trying to help the little guy do the same thing we’re doing on a big scale. I’ll give them the information free. I would train anybody in a heartbeat. The thing that people don’t realize is that in the irrigation and landscape industry, there needs to be more cooperation between all of us if we’re really going to overcome the drought we’re in.