The Energy Savers Team hosted Phil Szabo of Saturn Engineering Group for an Efficient Irrigation Webinar. Phil Szabo is an experienced engineer and energy auditor and has done many on-farm irrigation and pump efficiency audits and measurement-and-verifications.

Phil talked about the process of conducting an energy audit for pumps and irrigation systems and gave a worked example of an energy audit where three pumps were examined as well as some general findings from the energy audits he’s completed.

Phil’s mantra is If you can measure it, you can manage it and talked about some key concepts:

• Pumpstation efficiency
• Benchmarks for irrigation systems
• Energy management assessments and plans

What an energy assessment will give you:

• Energy tariff advice
• System performance and benchmarks
• Pump duty point for peak efficiency
• Pump duty point for maximum water flow rate.
• What you can change to get to peak efficiency

Phil talked about the steps in Pump selection and showed a worked example where he assessed and made recommendations for a system where 75 litres per second of irrigation water was required.

For more information about Pump energy assessments, contact Phil Szabo at phil.szabo@saturnengineeringgroup.com.au.

See our range of agricultural energy efficiency case studies including implemented projects HERE and Subscribe to our bi-monthly energy e-news HERE.

If you have any energy efficiency related questions for the team get in touch at energysavers@qff.org.au.