PGA National Pump Station Design, Installation & Maintenance

Location: Palm Beach Gardens, South Florida

Client: Lang Management

Market: Master Planned Community

A management company supporting a 43-neighborhood community with an inherited, ailing irrigation system that had been on the edge of failure for years.

The Challenge

A complete system overhaul involving design and install of 6 new pump stations, and finding and replacing all valves and controllers across a 2,430-acre site.

The Plan

A new, complete irrigation solution to end years spent in perpetual break and fix cycle. From a trusted partner who would stay the course.

Putting the Plan into Action

A two-project approach to provide a root and branch replacement irrigation system while causing as little disruption as possible.

The Results

A management company with confidence in their irrigation, supported by their irrigation partner, Hoover.

PGA National – Pump Station Design, Installation and Maintenance - Image 1

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The Background

PGA National is a 2,430 acre master-planned community in Palm Beach Gardens, South Florida. The community is split into 43 neighborhoods and has approximately 5,700 residential homes.

Poor Irrigation Infrastructure Inherited

From its inception in the early 1980s until the late 1990s, the community was controlled by the developer, who transferred ownership to the residents and a board of directors in 1998. The board of directors immediately hired Lang Management to maintain the community – including all the roadways and frontages, decorative landscaping and public greenspaces.

Unfortunately, Lang Management inherited a lot of problems.

PGA National was one of the first developments of its kind, and the developer didn’t have the experience - or wherewithal - needed to install suitable irrigation infrastructure. They didn’t invest in a proper maintenance programme either, or upgrade their pump stations when it became clear that the original system wouldn’t be able to cope with the demands of the development’s increasingly thirsty greenspaces.

To put it simply, Lang Management found themselves saddled with an inadequate irrigation system that was prone to frequent failure – and incredibly expensive to maintain.

There is no other company doing things the way Hoover do.

Dawn Levinstein, Property Manager, Lang Management

The Challenge

Anyone who’s struggled with a poorly designed - or optimized - irrigation system knows that it quickly takes over your life. For Lang Management, the constant outages, burst pipes, failing landscaping and frequent calls became a major source of frustration – and a significant overhead.

The team had personnel running out to do ad-hoc wet checks, scouring the field to track down electrical faults caused by ants chewing through valve wires, and fielding complaints from residents because a three inch main had burst in the night and flooded a roadway.

It was a disaster. But it’s worth noting that this isn’t an uncommon situation. A great many of Florida’s maintenance companies, HOAs and developers are stuck with problematic irrigation systems that seem to fall over in a stiff breeze – and rarely deliver on their promise to adequately nourish and support green spaces without chewing through the better part of your landscape budget.

This is partly down to inadequate design experience; building irrigation systems that can withstand the peculiarities of Florida’s climate, fauna and freak weather events demands a depth of knowledge that’s hard to obtain without serious dedication.

Designing for the future of a large master-planned community is challenging too. Until you’ve been through the process a few times, it’s hard to appreciate the amount of redundancy required to ensure that something like a motor failure or main line break doesn’t parch acres of landscaping.

But it’d be unfair to blame all the problems experienced at PGA National on poor design. The truth of the matter is that even the best irrigation system in the world will fall over if it’s not maintained properly. After twenty years of inadequate funding and neglect, the system at PGA national simply couldn’t keep up and desperately needed to be replaced.

Unfortunately, Lang Management couldn’t get sign off for a total replacement immediately, and had to rely on ‘band-aid’ fixes for another ten years.

And again, it’s worth noting that this is a situation familiar to many Florida HOAs and management companies. The idea of tearing everything out and starting from scratch is overwhelming to the people responsible for the purse strings, but trying to build on a rotten foundation locks you into a ‘break’ and ‘fix’ cycle that inevitably leads to skyrocketing repair bills, a depleted landscaping budget and a lot of unnecessary stress.

The Plan

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PGA National – Pump Station Design, Installation and Maintenance - The Plan

A Complete Irrigation Solution

When things finally reached breaking point at PGA National, Lang Management started searching for an irrigation partner that could get things back on track. We’d worked with Lang Management on other projects in the past, and the team managing the PGA National community had heard promising things about Flowguard too.

A Provider That Would Stay The Course

After years of ad-hoc wet checks, unexpected failures and unpleasant surprises, the promise of a system with full remote monitoring seemed too good to pass up, and they were determined to find a provider that would stick with the project – and provide ongoing support too.

Understandable goals, all things considered.

We’ve always made it our business to support and nurture our clients – it’s one of the reasons we’ve been so successful over the past four decades and we would have insisted on signing an ongoing maintenance agreement with a client installing six of our pump stations anyway, but it’s always nice to work with people who already appreciate your mode of operation.

Lang Management also liked that we designed and manufactured all of our pump stations here in Florida.

Still, the team were making a substantial investment and wanted to be sure that their money was well spent so we invited them to come out to our HQ, and gave them a tour of the manufacturing facility while talking them through our approach to large projects and explaining the philosophy underpinning the way we work.

This ameliorated any underlying concerns, and Lang Management commissioned us for two long-term projects to:

Design, manufacture and install six replacement pump stations, including all the work involved in removing the now-defunct pump stations struggling to support the community
Find, mark and replace all irrigation valves and controllers across the 2,430 site
Provide ongoing maintenance and support Lang Management’s on-site irrigation maintenance supervisor

Ultimately, it came down to Hoover vs. one other provider, but Hoover seemed more efficient and reliable.

Dawn Levinstein, Property Manager, Lang Management

Putting the Plan into Action

After several months, the team at Lang Management had a brand-new irrigation system that was finally fit for purpose and capable of supporting the development for years to come.

Trenching and installation work out of the way, we then provided an initial tranche of on-site training to Lang Management’s irrigation team – and some secondary training for the irrigation supervisor who’d be taking responsibility for the new system.

This brought everyone up to speed on the new pump stations, ensured familiarity with Flowguard (our remote monitoring software) and set expectations for the ongoing maintenance and support.

Unlike a lot of pump station manufacturers, we tend to be very hands-on with our support offering; monitoring and taking an active interest in Flowguard data, working to identify emergent problems before they spiral out of control, and maintaining open comms with on-site irrigation teams to ensure that they’ve got a good understanding of what’s happening under the covers of their irrigation pump stations.

Ultimately, we want our equipment to succeed and we know that optimal performance over the long-term is only possible when our clients and their agents in the field have the support, information and knowledge needed to keep things running smoothly.

For a development as large and as complex as PGA National, that does mean constant monitoring, a willingness to answer questions and frequent site visits, but this is a service that we’re more than happy to provide.

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“I’m the most pessimistic person. I half-expected Hoover to come in all gangbusters, but peter out after a few months. That never happened…They’re on top of it. I don’t know how they do it, honestly.”
Dawn Levinstein, Property Manager, Lang Management

In fact, it’s a service that we insist on providing because we understand that our reputation in Florida is built on our ability to deliver outstanding results over the life of a project. Support is part of our DNA – and a big part of what sets us apart from the competition.

Two Long And Complex Projects – Completed In Record Time

After the initial consultation and design work was out of the way, we embarked on a relatively gruelling programme of work to remove and replace all six of the development’s pump stations, closely followed by a second project to replace all of the controllers and valves used across the 2,430 acre PGA National site.
While working on both projects, we worked hard to minimize damage to both the landscape and roadways criss-crossing the community. We stayed on top of locates, and took great care to ensure that we were digging in the right places when installing the pump stations and the 55,000 ft of wire and conduits needed for the second project.
We also altered our schedules to minimize disruption during a global golf event that impacted the development for several weeks, and changed the way we worked to maintain progress throughout the rainy season.

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“I rely on Hoover. They’ve been phenomenal. The initial project went as smoothly as it could possibly go…Part of me expected devastation but it was a very good experience.”
Dawn Levinstein, Property Manager, Lang Management

The Results

This is an ongoing project, and one we’ll continue to support for a long time so it’s hard to provide definitive results.

What we can say is that since replacing PGA National’s six pump stations, valves and controllers, maintenance and repair bills have plummeted, landscaping budgets are under significantly less pressure and the team at Lang Management are much (much) less stressed about the performance of their irrigation system.

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“Since working with Hoover, I think we’ve had one incident with an irrigation sprinkler head. But it was pinpointed and fixed incredibly quickly.”
Dawn Levinstein, Property Manager, Lang Management

The maintenance reports and ongoing support that we provide is shielding the development from expensive problems. In fact, some of the independently-managed neighborhoods on the development are starting to switch to Hoover systems.

PGA National Pump Station Design, Installation & Maintenance

The Background

Poor Irrigation Infrastructure Inherited

The Challenge

The Plan

A Complete Irrigation Solution

A Provider That Would Stay The Course

Putting the Plan into Action

Two Long And Complex Projects – Completed In Record Time

The Results

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