News Release| water savings incentive; Cal State L.A.

April 21, 2010

Note to editors and news directors:
For the Water2Save press release, go to http://water2save.com/WLS/pr9.html.

Cal State L.A. saving water big-time: 27 million gallons in 18 months with new system

LADWP presents $50,000 incentive to Cal State L.A.
for conserving enough to serve water needs of 129 families

Los Angeles, CA — Using integrated “stealth” technology and automatic weather adjustments, a new cellular wireless water-management service at California State University, Los Angeles has reduced water usage by about 27 million gallons over an 18-month period — or roughly a million gallons for each of the 27 acres of irrigated landscaping on campus.

(Irrigation accounts for 70 percent of urban water use in the Southwestern U.S.; and the runoff from over-watered landscapes can carry fertilizers and pesticides into groundwater and the ocean.)

The ongoing savings at Cal State L.A. equates roughly to serving the water needs of 129 families in Los Angeles.

The service — developed and managed by the Solana Beach-based company Water2Save — provides remote water management with wireless remote-activation and data-transmission services; monitoring of usage; database management of daily runtimes; money-back savings guarantee; and performance tracking and reporting of dollar and water savings.

Recognizing the campus’s impressive conservation efforts on the eve of Earth Day, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) Technical Assistance Program (TAP) today presented Cal State L.A. a $50,000 water-savings performance-incentive calculated at $3.50 per thousand gallons saved.

Since the installation of the Water2Save’s wireless water-management service in September 2008, Cal State L.A. has also saved more than $100,000 in water-bill reductions.

Cal State L.A Director of Facilities Services John Ferris said, “Not only are we saving water, but the Water2Save service does not require my employees to learn a new system, which saves my staff a lot of time. They also do not have to change the watering schedules when the weather changes or shut the controllers off when it rains.”

According to Gary Gelinas, founder and CEO of Water2Save, “The aesthetic landscaping on the Cal State L.A. campus will continue to save significant amounts of water and money as well as maintain green and healthy plant material.... Water2Save remotely manages hundreds of similar large landscapes throughout California using forecasted and measured weather data.”

The LADWP TAP offers financial incentives to universities, commercial, industrial, institutional and multifamily residential customers for the installation of pre-approved water-saving equipment, water-savings performance management services and water-efficiency products.   

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Working for California since 1947: The 175-acre hilltop campus of California State University, Los Angeles is at the heart of a major metropolitan city, just five miles from Los Angeles’ civic and cultural center. More than 20,000 students and 210,000 alumni—with a wide variety of interests, ages and backgrounds—reflect the city’s dynamic mix of populations. Six Colleges offer nationally recognized science, arts, business, criminal justice, engineering, nursing, education and humanities programs, among others, led by an award-winning faculty. Cal State L.A. is home to the critically-acclaimed Luckman Jazz Orchestra and to a unique university center for gifted students as young as 12. Programs that provide exciting enrichment opportunities to students and community include an NEH- and Rockefeller-supported humanities center; a NASA-funded center for space research; and a growing forensic science program, housed in the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center. www.calstatela.edu