Water Use in High Desert
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| Here in the arid high desert of New Mexico we are all concerned about water and water use. In our own High Desert development we use quite a bit of it in our xeriscape landscaping as shown in the photo of the median along Imperata, near Spain. Water is one of those things we can’t do without. Moreover, the City of Albuquerque is now scrutinizing the way landscape projects are using this precious commodity. If we don’t show we are using our water responsibly, the City will impose significant penalties on our community in an attempt to convince us of the wisdom of careful use. High Desert has about 75 acres of common use land, including much with some level of irrigation. When we are talking about a project the size of the High Desert Landscape Project, we all have concerns about what is going on and how water is used. We currently (as of 2005) use an average of over 750,000 gallons per month to maintain our community to our present standards. At an average overall cost of about $2.68 per unit (748 gallons), including all service charges, over the past year that’s an average of almost $2700 per month! Thus conserving water is still vitally important to us in High Desert, especially when you consider the cost per gallon. |
High Desert Water Use
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So, the question comes up “how well are we really doing?” I’d like to try to answer this by showing you some data. Figure 1 shows our total community water use each month since June 2001. This kind of graph may be interesting, but it is also pretty confusing, since it includes seasonal variations, weather variations, system breakdowns, and other things all folded together. |
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| A much more interesting way to look at the data averages out the biggest source of variability, seasonal variations. To do this, we plot a “12 month trailing average,” which simply averages each month with the previous 11 months. So for March of 2005, we use the average of the months of April 2004 through March of 2005. Figure 2 shows this graph. Of course, Figure 2 also combines the total water use from all community uses, including landscaping in newer areas that is coming “on-line” as it is completed and irrigation breakdowns that cause inadvertent loss, as well as tuning or improvements that make the system operate more efficiently. You can see that this “metric” or measure of average water use has improved pretty steadily since the middle of 2003. This improvement is a result of a lot of hard work on learning how to tune the system for vegetation maturation and weather variations, detect and correct system breakdowns, and learning how to anticipate and test for problems before they cause significant water or plant material loss. |
What Do City Records Show for High Desert Water Use?
| The City of Albuquerque recently released its Water Budget Report for irrigation users. Using aerial and surface surveys, the city estimates that High Desert has 36.73 acres under irrigation. The city’s Water Waste and Landscaping Ordinance allows 35 inches of water per year in irrigated areas. That’s a water budget of 34,889,889 gallons for our irrigated area. The city’s meters show that we used only 9,720,186 gallons, or only 27.9% or our allowed water budget for calendar year 2004. What can we expect in the future? Clearly we can’t expect to see this improvement continue indefinitely. Moreover, we will never see our water use go to zero. In High Desert, we have basically three types of landscape. In Open Space areas and some of the Streetscapes, the water use will become quite small since these concentrate on vegetation that is native to the area. In other areas such as the Pino Pond Park, where we have mimicked a range of life zones in the central New Mexico area, the water use may become low, but will continue to require some irrigation to remain healthy. In other areas, such as the parks that are in several of the Villages, such as Desert Mountain (seen here, in photo) and Pinon Point, we maintain turf for playground areas. These will continue to require heavy irrigation in order to remain healthy. However, this is a mix that has served our community well by providing a diverse collection of habitats for both Association owners and local wildlife. |  |