Peter Estournes, vice president and chief operating officer for Gardenworks in Healdsburg, Calif., says products from Hunter Industries have been his company’s go-to for decades, including Hunter’s Hydrawise line of Wi-Fi irrigation controllers.
“We’ve been pretty much installing Hunter products 100 percent,” Estournes says.
Estournes says Gardenworks also deploys Hunter’s Solar Sync and Rain-Clik sensors. Gardenworks serves primarily residential clients and provides design/build, water management and landscape management services.
He says he’s been a Hunter customer since the company’s first PGP pop-up sprinkler in 1981.
“I started with (Hunter) back in the days when they first invented their PGP pop-up,” he says.
Estournes says after experiencing a system failure, he learned how Hunter was beta testing the PGPs.
“Hunter came in and installed 40 or 50 sprinkler heads at their cost,” he says.
He says that’s what got him hooked, and the relationship with the company grew.
“Most landscape companies like to standardize as much as they can, so we chose Hunter as our go-to product,” he says.
Staying connected
Estournes says ensuring clients optimize their home network is now a bigger part of the job for the Gardenworks team during installations.
“You just have to check that connectivity,” he says. “A lot of the primary failures we run into are losing connection and (clients) not always knowing that right away.”
Estournes says irrigation technicians check Hunter controllers every site visit. Crews take meter readings to ensure the system functions properly.
Gardenworks installs Hunter’s AC2 Wi-Fi amplifiers and other equipment to get the most out of the irrigation system and connectivity.
“It’s a caveat that we put in our proposals, that the client needs to have a strong or at least adequate Wi-Fi (network) set up and ready to go,” he says. “You absolutely need it to power the needs of the controller.”
