Sawgrass Country Club gets real-time weather conditions at their course thanks to the new WatchDog® 3250!
Bill Schmit, golf course maintenance superintendent at Sawgrass Country Club in Florida, shares with Spectrum® Technologies his experiences using our measurement technology at his golf course.
What is the biggest challenge at your golf course?
Like most clubs, we are competing in a challenging labor market and trying to manage traffic while maintaining high quality conditions. While we do have some level of control over these factors, we cannot control the weather. The WatchDog® 3250 weather station gives us real-time information and the ability to track and run reports on the weather. This has been very helpful for us.
How has our product helped improve your turf’s performance or your golf course’s operations?
Through the WatchDog® app on our smartphones, we have information at our fingertips that has been a great help in our scheduling. We know what our conditions are and what to expect each day. Before leaving for the club each morning, I check the weather through the app. The app gives me information like rainfall, temperature and wind speed and lets us know what the day will bring. This information, along with a reasonably accurate weather forecast, arms us with the knowledge of how the day will shape up before it even begins.
What types of improvements or changes have you made to your golf course as a result of using the WatchDog® 3250?
The WatchDog® 3250 weather station, along with the reports available through Spectrum® Technologies, has given us the ability to refine many things in our operation, the most important being irrigation scheduling. The WatchDog® weather station has integrated seamlessly with our Toro Lynx software. This allows us to irrigate based on evapotranspiration and gives us the ability to set alarm responses in the software that will turn irrigation on or off based on weather conditions or rainfall. This has led to significant water savings and helps us be better stewards of our resources. Additionally, the ability to track information like growing degree days and historical temperatures allows us to better schedule many of our chemical and fertilizer applications. In all, the accurate and timely weather information has contributed to many incremental changes that have made a noticeable difference in our operations and course conditions.
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