How Technology can Minimize Water Loss

Gus and I are always happy to explain how water works in landscapes and fields. Most plants and crops only excrete water through stomatal pores during active photosynthesis. This process is called evapotranspiration, and it’s a primary way that soil loses moisture. As a wise water user, your role is to wait patiently while Mother Nature restores soil moisture with rainfall, after which you step in and provide just the right amount of supplemental irrigation to make up for any essential shortfall. When you irrigate, you must be especially careful not to water too much or too fast. These bad practices lead to saturation, deep percolation and runoff, all of which have negative consequences on plant, soil, and water quality. This tricky plant-soil-water balance makes irrigation timing critically important and doing it well is difficult, even for experts. Fortunately, B-hyve makes bad irrigators good and great irrigators truly exceptional. How much water does B-hyve save by counting rainfall? In a typical May to September growing season, my landscape needs 23 inches of water. During this same period, Mother Nature provides about 6 inches of beneficial rainfall. B-hyve constantly tracks rainfall and deducts it from the watering schedule, saving 76,300 gallons each year. How do I save even more water? I normally set my B-hyve to U.S. Drought Monitor D1 mode, even when my area is technically not in a drought stage. This simple action has a negligible impact on the appearance of my landscape while saving an additional 38,900 gallons each year. If you want to give drought settings a try, start at D0 drought mode and work your way up to D1 mode. This will give your landscape time to acclimate. If you want even more water conservation ideas, such as truing up your watering times with a catch cup test, use the new B-hyve in-app chat to talk with our friendly experts. This is the year you can start conserving and protecting your local lake or aquifer with B-hyve. We call these best practices, “Changing the way the world waters,” and we’re doing it from residential hose faucets to the largest farms. Come join us! #water

Technology Assisted Impact Assessment of wide spread Watershed Treatment projects Reviving and restoring water bodies is well accepted as a proven method to recharge ground water and heal degraded soil. This leads to higher water and food security for communities as well as longer sustained agricultural cycles, both significant contributors to wellbeing and prosperity. India has more than 640,000 villages which stand to benefit if water is managed well. But actively monitoring India’s 3 Million water bodies spread over 3,287,263 km2 is a formidable challenge. How can technologies like AI and ML serve humanity by addressing this gap? GreenGood Labs, LLC. has developed sophisticated ML algorithms that track all 3 Million water bodies across India. In collaboration with Objectif France Inde, we are demonstrating in real tangible ways, the effectiveness of remote sensing and AI/ML in tracking the long term impacts of watershed treatments while also providing climate resilience through rich actionable insights. Objectif France Inde (OFI) has led the restoration of 100 water bodies in Southern India. With technology support from GreenGood Labs, LLC., the OFI team and local partners have been able to determine and validate a winning package of best practices that lead to  1) Multiple harvests in a year (a 300% increase in harvest events) from prior years 2) Longer sustained soil moisture and green cover throughout the year 3) Recharging of borewells and aquifers 4) Improved leveraging of the network effects of interconnected water bodies OFI has more than 30 years of experience working on sustainable development in India. OFI works in partnership with local NGOs on integrated rural development projects in the states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal. GreenGood Labs has completed several watershed design and analytical projects across Asia, Europe, Africa and American continents. #ecosystemrestoration #regenerativedesign #resilience #hydrology #saveoursoils #planttherain #fragiletofertile #adaptation #foodsecurity #ClimateResilience #Irrigation #SustainableAgriculture #RemoteSensing #Hydrology #WASH #water #WaterScarcity

Open-Loop Equipment: With open-loop equipment, process fluid enters the top of the cooling tower and flows over the fill (or heat transfer media). At this point, the process water is open to outdoor air and any contaminants present in the atmosphere. Falling from the fill, water collects in a basin before returning to the facility’s cooling loop. Due to airborne pollutants, incoming contaminants from the makeup water supply, and the presence of absorbed oxygen, proper maintenance of all equipment in the loop is critical. This also heightens the importance of water/fluid filtration and treatment. If the process water in the basin of the open tower is not properly treated, filtrated, and maintained. Closed-Loop Technology: Some cooling applications require a closed-loop system for peak-efficiency long term operation. These types of systems generally include the use of small heat exchangers in terminal units or other connected equipment, making maintenance complicated, if at all possible. For example, buildings with water-source heat pump loops – widely used for office, hotel, and health care facilities – are among one of the largest markets for fluid coolers. Using an open-cooling loop could pose the significant risk of fouling hundreds of heat exchangers in a condominium or similar facility. Closed circuit systems are also prevalent among data centers, battery plants, grow room facilities, high-efficiency chiller applications, and multiple different types of industrial process loops. Water loss through evaporation is either reduced or eliminated, depending on the type of closed-loop cooling equipment selected. The same is true for water treatment chemicals and/or systems; closed-loop technology can help to dramatically reduce or even eliminate the need for chemical treatment of system fluids. Closed circuit coolers can also provide completely dry sensible heat rejection when outside ambient conditions are favorable. This dry capacity is an added benefit that can greatly reduce the overall water consumption on a project. Fluid coolers can be sized for full design or partial load based on a dry bulb switchover temperature. This means that the recirculating spray pump can be de-energized when the heat load can be fully satisfied by just the fluid cooler fans. While this operational mode greatly reduces water consumption, energy is also saved since the recirculating pump is off.

I confess to not really being a tech person 💾 . For me, that means I can find it hard to understand descriptions of new digital tools like AI and how they can benefit the planet 🌎 without concrete descriptions or case studies of how technology is put into use. For those reasons, I am really excited that our newest blog provides real-world examples of how we are using AI within our own Amazon buildings to improve water conservation 🚰 and energy efficiency 💡.   Using a new utility detection tool called FlowMS, we detected a water leak in a facility in Scotland and fixed the issue, which helped precent 9M gallons of water being lost annually. And we are expanding use of FlowMS and other AI tools across Amazon buildings.    https://lnkd.in/e5brhkej

🌍 Microsoft’s new data center design wastes zero water - featuring a closed liquid cooling loop. I saw something similar in Oak Ridge National Laboratory closed liquid cooling for the Summit SuperComputer. Anyway, here’s why this matters: Traditionally, AI operations in data centers consume enormous amounts of energy and water. For every 20–50 ChatGPT queries, nearly a bottle of fresh water is evaporated during cooling: https://lnkd.in/expaA8pc Microsoft’s new design eliminates this problem. Here’s how it works: • Traditional Cooling: Most data centers are air-cooled. Heat from servers is removed by cooling towers, which use water that partially evaporates into the air during cooling. •Microsoft’s Liquid Cooling: Heat from server chips is transferred to a closed-loop water system via direct-to-chip liquid cooling. The heated water is carried to a chiller, where a second refrigerant loop removes the heat. The water stays in the system, eliminating evaporation entirely. What Made This Possible: 1️⃣ Chips were redesigned to operate at higher temperatures. 2️⃣ Direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems were developed to safely manage the process. 3️⃣ AI growth created a critical demand for more efficient cooling technologies. To learn more about Microsoft data center design, check out: https://lnkd.in/e2vNanX7 #watercooling #ai #datacenter #cooling #water #energy #hvac #automation #builtenvironment #thermalmanagment