Photo: Jain IrrigationJain Irrigation’s mission is to leave the world in a better place than how they found it and one way the company is working to achieve that is by saving water with Jain Unity.
Jain Unity is an automatic irrigation control system and environmental data services platform that is fully powered by artificial intelligence and predictive analytics.
Currently in the industry, there is a major issue with water waste in the landscape and Richard Restuccia, VP of water management solutions at Jain, says there is no other industry where this level of waste is considered normal and acceptable.
There are multiple reasons why this is such a problem, including poor emission devices, irrigation breaks and uncontrollable environmental aspects. Jain’s new product is designed to help solve this issue by taking the guesswork out of complicated irrigation controller programming.
Landscapers can view daily evapotranspiration rates on the desktop. Photo: Jain Irrigation
“Jain Unity processes over a billion pieces of information hourly on how soil moisture responds to rain or irrigation events based on the different plant factors, soil types, weather and environmental conditions at the site-specific location,” Restuccia says. “Connecting to irrigation control that automatically acts upon this algorithm to implement the best strategies for minimizing water usage, and managing nutrient loss fulfills the promise of AI and predictive analytics.”
Jain says Unity answers the question of how much water does a landscape need. Unity measures evapotranspiration (ET) and other environmental calculations, such as weather from multiple sources, to provide the most thorough information for its algorithms.
Some of the other data points include dew point, wind, cloud cover, humidity and temperature. Unity makes daily and hourly adjustments based on live ET.
It sends out a watering schedule to all models of existing ET water smart controllers and other units in the field over a secure cellular wireless network, so it is not dependent on WiFi.
“Designed for extensibility that allows swift integration of virtually an unlimited number of data sources, the Unity platform can cross-correlate and analyze data in a learning system that intelligently, automatically adapts to make continuous improvement for sustainable resource consumption,” says Aric Olson, president of Jain Irrigation. “Its release marks an important event for Jain toward ‘unifying’ our broad AgTech base worldwide and meeting the challenges in a rapidly changing future of water.”
Users can access Unity on their desktop and with one dashboard view plant moisture levels, weekly notifications on ET loss and replenishment, and extensive historical and forecast weather data. Landscapers can also use the rainfall probability through Jain Unity to schedule their crews.
Landscapers can flag problem zone for future repair on the mobile version of Unity.Photo: Jain Irrigation
On the mobile version, push notifications are sent out letting landscape contractors know about the health of their systems.
“A user’s ability to see and understand their water usage outdoors engages them directly in its conservation; reinforcing changes to their behavior that can add up to substantial cost savings for them, while also contributing to greater water resource savings for our communities’ livability and affordability,” Restuccia says.
Also, on the mobile platform, users can select a site and flag certain zone and leave notes so other crew members can view and repair the issue later on. Optional flow monitoring can automatically detect leaks and close master valves to prevent flooding.
Landscapers can run multi-station wet checks and see the real-time controller status all through Unity Mobile. End users can also set up irrigation restriction times so Unity only waters properties at the best time during the permitted time zones, based on your region.
Jain Unity offers reporting tools that can help landscapers communicate to their customers their water savings.
