Urban Mobile Lab
Our Urban Mobile Lab provides assistance to public water supply utilities in conserving water and reducing unaccounted-for water.
Water audits
A water audit will determine the amount of unaccounted-for water (UAW) and what actions are necessary to reduce losses.
EZ-Audit is program which allows a property owner to test the performance of an in-ground irrigation system, and calculates how long the system needs to run to provide adequate irrigation quantities without over irrigating. Not only does this save the property owner money, it conserves our precious water supply. Because the EZ-Audit programs considers average monthly evapotranspiration* rates and historic rainfall by county within the Southwest Florida Water Management District, the irrigation system run times change from month-to-month. The user must be willing to reschedule the irrigation system controller as necessary for the benefits of an E-Z Audit to be realized.
In order to test an irrigation system using EZ-Audit, the user must have approximately thirty (30) identical containers, such as empty tuna cans. The containers will be placed throughout the irrigated area in accordance with EZ-Audit's detailed instructions. While inexpensive plastic cups available at any grocery store will work, they are not very stable and are likely to tip and spill during the test unless they can be secured in an upright position. The irrigation system is then run for a known period of time, and the amount of water captured in each of the containers is measured (this requires an inexpensive graduated cylinder, available at most hobby stores). Finally, the data is input into the EZ-Audit program which creates a month-by-month irrigation schedule.
Download EZ-Audit (self-extracting ZIP file).
EZ-Audit.exe consists of several small data files and two executable files; the EZ-Audit program and instructions for using EZ-Audit. EZ-Audit should be copied to a folder entitled "irrigate" then executed (double-click on file). All of the files contained in the zipped file must be present in your "irrigate" folder for EZ-Audit to operate properly.
EZ-Audit is not a Windows program; it is run from the MS-DOS prompt. While it has a schedule printing option, it may not print properly because of the wide variety of printers in use. If problems are encountered when printing the schedule, one can either write the month-to-month run times on a sheet of paper, or highlight the schedule, and then copy and paste it to a word processing program. It can then be printed as a word processing document.
* Evapotranspiration: the amount of water taken by a plant (in this case turf grass) from the soil by its roots and then evaporated into the atmosphere through its leaves (in the case of turf, the individual blades of grass).
