AT&T Uses IoT in Irrigation to Help Lowe's
Water conservation is important to home-improvement retailer Lowe’s, where conventional irrigation systems at the company’s 900 stores were known to shower the landscaping even during rainstorms. Then, it teamed with AT&T and HydroPoint to install a new product, Smart Irrigation, that uses a network of sensors to modulate water flow based on current weather conditions and future forecasts. By using data to determine when and how much to water, Lowe’s saves $5 million annually in water bills and 650 million gallons in water (enough to fill almost 1,000 Olympic-size swimming pools). Because treatment and pumping use so much energy, saving that much water also effectively reduces community greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equal to burning 84 thousand gallons of gasoline.
Smart irrigation controllers utilizing AT&T IoT solutions allow for more efficient, real-time maintenance of these connected devices at Lowe’s. “Before, water leaks, particularly those small in nature, were very difficult to detect,” says Richard Goodman, Lowe’s vice president of retail facilities management. “These types of leaks would simply filter into the ground, as they were not large enough to provide visible evidence or the physical presence of a leak.” And as with Grind2Energy, AT&T has installed the Smart Irrigation system at many of its own facilities and offers the solution to its customers as part of its Smart Cities offerings.