JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Hot days are here, and many homeowners will want to water their lawns every day especially when it doesn’t rain but some lawn lovers might water their grass too much and they don’t know there is a schedule.
Before a drop of reclaimed water for your lawn and gardens gets to your home, it starts with a thorough process. First, they have to get that water ready for the public.
Trey Lehman, a JEA Water Operations Coordinator and Zasha Del Orbe, JEA Manager for Wastewater Treatment and Reuse, explain.
“Every house in the Mandarin area sends wastewater to this facility and we treat the wastewater and turn it into reclaimed which then goes out for irrigation, golf courses, any purple pipe that you see in the Mandarin area combines with the other plants and goes out to the customers,” Lehman said.
Just outside the control room for operations is the system.
“This is our actual treatment process. These are our irrigation basins, the clarifiers and we have the reclaimed for the public access and also for the river,” said Del Orbe. “Once the treatment is complete, we do UV disinfection and it’s sent into the reclaimed for the customers.”
The entire process takes 8 to 12 hours.
6.3 million gallons are processed per day.
WATERING SCHEDULE:
- Residential properties with odd-numbered or no addresses may water Wednesdays and Saturdays.
- Residential properties with even-numbered addresses may water Thursdays and Sundays.
- Nonresidential properties may water Tuesdays and Fridays.
JEA recommends watering from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. for no more than one hour per zone for optimal system performance.
In Springfield, Yorlynn Kinsey loves to garden; in fact she might change her plants out every year. Instead of using the water hose, she fills up a bucket with water and sprinkles water drops onto her newly added plants.
40 percent of homeowners don’t know there is a watering schedule, and Kinsey didn’t know either.
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The St. Johns River Water Management District provides guidelines for your watering schedule.
The district covers several counties in Northeast Florida.
JEA has these tips for customers:
- Avoid watering between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. This SJRWMD rule helps conserve water, protect your lawn, and maintain system pressure. Daytime watering is wasteful — most water evaporates before it can soak in.
- Invest in a WaterSense-labeled smart irrigation controller to help reduce wasteful watering and save up to $150 with a JEA rebate.
- Water for no more than one hour per zone.
- Inspect your irrigation system to check for leaks and broken or misaligned sprinkler heads.
- Schedule a free in-person JEA Irrigation Assessment to learn ways to make your irrigation system more efficient and how you can avoid wasteful watering. Call to schedule: 904-665-6000.You can find all of this in the story at news4jax.com
