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What You’ll Learn
Central Georgia EMC has deployed 18 smart mowers to save money on a landscaping contract. Seeing the autonomous mowers working on the grounds started community conversations and further positioned the co-op as a technology leader for electrification and smart products. Brad Naylor and John Harkness explain how they’ve deployed this new cutting edge technology.
Show Notes
Transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Intro: A production of Pioneer Utility Resources. StoryConnect, helping communicators discover ideas to shape their stories and connect with their customers.
Andy Johns: What can smart mowers do for your co-op? That’s what we’ll be talking about on this episode of StoryConnect. My name is Andy Johns with Pioneer, and I’m joined on this episode by Brad Naylor, who is the supervisor of Fleet Facilities, and John Harkness, who is the Senior VP of distribution services at Central Georgia EMC, and Jackson, Georgia. Brad and John, thanks for joining me.
Brad & John: Yes, thank you for having us.
Andy Johns: So as some of the listeners who have been on a while know, I am a self-professed smart home nerd. And so when I heard the story about you guys using smart mowers to keep the grass under control there in the middle of Georgia, this is a podcast episode I knew that I wanted to record. So let’s go ahead, and John, why don’t you start us off, but when we say smart mowers, you guys are using smart mowers, what do you guys have got going on?
John Harkness: We partnered with Husqvarna about 18 months ago to try to streamline and reduce the cost of our landscape maintenance costs. Every time we renewed our conventional contract, the escalation of the contract price was just wearing us out.
Andy Johns: Landscaping?
John Harkness: Yeah, that’s right.
Andy Johns: Landscaping contract.
John Harkness: We have a large campus, nearly 75 acres total, with about 25 or so acres of grass. It has to be maintained with that. It’s a very chopped up campus; yards here, yards there, inside a fence, outside a fence, along a state highway, parking lots, sidewalks. Very complex campus for conventional maintenance crews to try to handle. So with those rising cost and new technology available, we decided internally to give smart mowers a try. In doing so, we tasked Brad with acquiring a few different models. A few different brands and test them. See what we can do with them. What benefits we could get. Stretch their potential. After several months of testing, the Husqvarna unit far outweighed the others that we had. And then Brad began to reach out to Husqvarna for a large-scale project, and we found out that we could, in a sense, partner with them for development of a system across our entire campus. In conjunction with that, we showcased our system for them. We have an open house or field day, I guess you’d call it, every spring for them to bring out potential customers to show what we’ve been able to do with their product, how it’s worked for us, what our benefits have been, and basically just let them shine because their product is truly done a really nice job for us.
Andy Johns: Yeah, sounds like it. And so you guys are, just to kind of talk a little bit about Central Georgia EMC. You guys are an electric co-op, obviously, but you’ve also got a fiber play out there as well with the Connect Fiber Broadband Service. So the technology, you know, a lot of the topics that are out there right now, people are talking about the electrification of, you know, different items, different appliances, different tools, that sort of thing. You’ve also got the smart home aspect of it. So I really like that, you know, you’re kind of putting some of that into practice here. But Brad, I don’t know that a lot of people have really seen a smart mower or know much about it. So, and it’s a little tough being on just audio here, but a lot of folks kind of know what a Roomba is. And these look kind of like just bigger versions of the Roombas for outside, right?
Brad Naylor: Yeah. Well, they look like a – so if you can picture a push mower. They look exactly like the body of a push mower without the handlebars.
Andy Johns: Okay.
Brad Naylor: I mean that’s about the simplest way to put it. I mean, they look exactly like a push mower without the push bar. So they’re about 28 pounds, about 28in long, 22in wide and about a foot tall.
Andy Johns: And so you guys have a whole bunch of these, a whole fleet of them out there. So I know when we were talking the other day, you said it’s been, I don’t know whether John wants to jump in or if it’s Brad, but it’s been something that certainly catches people’s attention and folks have, you know, when they’re driving by and they’re seeing them or whatever, it’s something that started a lot of conversations, it sounds like.
Brad Naylor: Yes.
John Harkness: So, yeah. And our lawn areas, we have several areas that are open to the public. Around our front door main lobby, we’ve got a unit that works around our customer entrance. We have units that are inside of security fences. We have about a five-acre field between two of our buildings that sits right on a corner intersection where we have five units running, and they’re highly visible from the state highway traffic and from our foot traffic where the customers come into the facility.
Andy Johns: Got it. So I know when I think about it, when I talk about it, I’m coming from a PR, communication side of things. I know that kind of that interaction and showing folks how to use some of these tools is important. But the reason that you guys have deployed these is a cost savings. And I know you guys really did your homework on that. So, I don’t know how much, how many of the details that you want to get into. I know a lot of them have been published in a local newspaper, that sort of thing. But talk us through a little bit about, you mentioned that big landscaping contract. Talk us through a little bit about the savings and operationally what this has done for you all.
John Harkness: So we were spending roughly $50,000 a year just in landscape maintenance. Of course, you can’t eliminate all of that. Some of that included pine straw, trimming, things of that nature. But a large part of that number was contract labor for riding a conventional lawn mower, carrying a weed eater, blower, things of that nature. So we’ve been able to reduce that cost where we’ll have a break even point in roughly two years into our project. We are in the beginning of year two, more than pleased with the performance of the units to date. I think Brad has our system set up where we have 17 units total covering our 25 acres or so of actual lawn that we maintain. Brad can give you – we have a variety of mowers. They’re not all the same. There are different sizes, shapes to them and different purposes, and Brad can go into the variety of the units we have. But we also shaving cost, these units on average are about $12 a year to operate worth of energy, for keeping the batteries charged for operation. Now, there’s blades that have to be changed, minor maintenance that goes in with them like there would be with any mower. But you couldn’t run a unit on our campus one time, one day for $12 worth of gas, and we’re able to get about $12 worth of energy over the course of an entire year.
Andy Johns: How about that? That’s a pretty good number. I think a lot of folks will be interested to hear that. You mentioned there, John. But Brad, go ahead and talk us through some of the different units. And then kind of why those different types of units are needed. But I guess before we go into that too much. So just so that folks understand how these work, these are running – tell us a little bit about the schedule, and then how you have them deployed and then I think that kind of goes into what the different units are.
Brad Naylor: Okay. Some of our areas, like you said before, we have areas all chopped up, all over our campus. Some range from like an eighth of an acre, all the way up to five acres for our large field. And we currently have six different, I mean, I’m sorry, eight different models of mowers we use. Everything from small residential units, all the way up to a commercial four-wheel drive articulated unit that can go up a 70-degree bank. But most of our landscape here, we use wired units. Some use GPS guidance.
Andy Johns: When you’re saying wired, they’re all battery operated, but you’ve got the wires kind of guiding them to show them boundaries.
Brad Naylor: Yes, the guide wires. So they operate similar to a Roomba. Where a Roomba will bump into a obstacle or a perimeter like your outside walls of your house or the inside walls of your house, these come up on wires similar to a dog fence, a boundary wire for a dog fence. They come up to that wire, and they’ll drive over it. And you can customize how far you want to drive it over through an app. But they come up, come over that wire, stop, turn around and go back the other way. So they come out from a centralized charging station, and they go around however you have it laid out, mapped out, with the wires for the boundary wires, and then they go throughout that area and just bounce off the different areas and just go back and charge themselves.
Andy Johns: And they are running – I think you said, y’all have some of them set to run kind of 7 to 7, and they’ll just run pretty much all the time and just take a little bit off the top of the grass to kind of keep it all uniform.
Brad Naylor: Yes. Our schedule, some run 24/7 because they’re in larger areas, and they’re the commercial grade mowers. But some run from 7 to 7, five days a week. And we just control them with an app. We each have them set up custom kind of for the area they’re in.
Andy Johns: I just have 2 or 3. I could talk, we could talk quite a while about this kind of stuff. But I know yesterday you mentioned ants, but what have been some of the surprises as you’ve worked on this? Is there anything kind of surprised you in the project as you’ve gone along and rolled these guys out?
Brad Naylor: Well, like you said, the ants. Ant hills are virtually almost invisible out there now. The mowers run so frequently that ants don’t have time to catch up and rebuild their mounds. And they get pushed further and further out to the perimeter of the areas. And you’ll see them every now and then. They’ll be on the outskirts of the area where they’ve built a nest or something. And, you know, we’ll take care of that as they come up. But out in our main fields and areas, there’s no ant hills.
John Harkness: I was surprised at the quality of the finished product. I’ll have to say, I was very intrigued with the idea of these mowers. The technology fascinated me, but when Brad plugged them in and got them set up and they started running, and you see this sporadic pattern that they have where they just kind of go here, there and yonder with what you think is random. My first thought was, “Oh, there’s going to be spots missed all over the place.”
Andy Johns: Yeah. Mohawks and everything. Yeah.
John Harkness: Once they cover the entire area, it’s not really random. It looks as though it is, but it knows where it’s going. It knows where it’s been. It knows what it’s missed. And surprisingly, there haven’t been any skipped areas that we found. The only areas of really any needed maintenance are along the boundary wire and that just depends on how close you want it to run to curb lines, to the edge of the highway, things that nature. You have to be a little careful running along a curb line. If you’re too aggressive with how close you want to get to the curb, it will sometimes fall off the curb. So you still have to do a little manual trimming along the edges, things of that nature. But I have been really surprised at just how good of a job these units do, especially in the five-acre field. That area looks like it’s been mowed every day, and virtually it has been. But you never see the ankle high grass shoots. You don’t see the clumps of grass that you traditionally get. If it rains for a week and your landscapers can’t get in there, and then when they do come in, they mow. You have clumps of grass that you have to rake up. It looks like a very neat freshly cut lawn every day.
Andy Johns: How about that? Yeah, that’s a pretty strong endorsement there. So I know we talked about a little bit at the beginning, but just as we’re kind of wrapping up here. In terms of the PR value, I know you guys have been in the, I think, it was NRECA magazine. You’ve been in the local newspaper. You guys are now podcast stars, so there’s that. But you know, back when you think about the 1930’s, back when electricity was new and for a lot of rural areas, they did those roadshows or had people come in. And they were showing people the different appliances they could use to what electricity could do for them with washers and ovens and all those types of things. And to me, this is kind of the same kind of idea that, you know, look at what technology, look at what beneficial electrification, look at what smart home type things can do. So let’s, you know, just tell me a little bit as we’re wrapping up here, what are some of the things that either employees or folks in the community have said when they come by and they see that you guys have something that’s – well, I was going to try to go the whole episode without saying cutting edge, but the kind of cutting edge technology that you guys have? I couldn’t help it. What are folks saying when they say something about the system you guys have set up?
John Harkness: The public is highly intrigued. And I’d hate to guess at how many, but I think that there have been quite a few sales for residential installations based on what some of our customers and members have seen as they’ve come by and looked at them. And as they investigate what they may be able to do for them. And you mentioned the roadshows in the early days of electricity, that’s one of the reasons we like to have the open house here. Of course, we can’t take the units out on the road and actually show them, but we do open our areas up so that members can come by and see. We’ve really been focused on some of the school systems that we serve for their electric accounts to help them with some of their lawn care maintenance and our larger industry areas. Anytime we can help them use smarter energy to maintain their campus, that’s a win for them. It’s a win for Central Georgia. And of course, that’s a win for the environment if we’re able to cut emissions and CO2 back. Now, we’re not talking large scale reductions, but every little bit helps. And another big advantage to these units is there’s no dust, and there’s no noise. Yeah, that’s huge. I don’t think we’d mentioned that before, but you’re not sitting in your office and hear the lawnmower go zooming by, disturbing you while you’re on a webinar or on a phone call. And if you walk outside on a break during the day or trying to leave in the afternoon, there’s not a cloud of dust. There’s not this smell of fresh cut grass that so many people seem to be allergic to these days. It always looks like it’s done without the nuisance of of actually being done.
Brad Naylor: Yes.
Andy Johns: It’s a good point. Last question, and Brad, I’ll start with you before we jump back over to John. What advice do you have for somebody – you mentioned there’s been some interest and whether they are a school system or whether there’s somebody listening who’s got either a telephone co-op, or an electric co-op, or whatever the utility is with some space around it. What advice do you have to somebody who’s listening to this and say, you know, this might be the kind of thing that we want to start at our place. What advice would you give them, Brad?
Brad Naylor: To do their research. Like I said, we use eight different mowers here. Eight different models. Each one has its own benefit and reason for being in the area it is in. You need to evaluate the type of area they’re going to want to cut, and what they want to get out of it. You know, is it going to be a rough terrain area? Is it going to be flat and smooth? Is it going to be, we have an area here that is about a 70 degree incline that one of our mowers goes up and down every day, cutting up and down that. So they need to really look and see, you know, do the research and see which mower is going to be the best fit for them.
Andy Johns: Yeah. And John, to piggyback on that, you know, what advice do you have? But also, did you have any trouble kind of running this up the chain and getting everybody to buy in? Hey, this is an expensive idea, but a good one, and it’ll pay back. What advice do you have either for folks wanting to do it, or for folks just trying to jump through some of those hoops and get things approved?
John Harkness: Oh, we didn’t have any trouble from running it up the chain. The overarching idea actually came to us from our chief operating officer who saw a very similar product at a high-end resort, maintaining a little bitty small area. And we kind of, Brad and I, kind of ran with that of, how do you make this a larger scale? For me, I would say folks need to look at their ROI. It makes sense in a lot of cases to go to a smart mower. In some cases, it does not, and you really need to look at your specific situation. Technology is going to continue to improve. The mowers are going to get bigger, stronger, longer lasting, more durable and to cover much larger areas. There are units out there now that they’re working with for golf courses, greens keepers, things of that nature. So, you know, subdivision lots. Small rural lots, you know, with a couple of acres of yard. It might make good sense for you to consider one of these as opposed to buying a conventional zero turn mower or something of that nature based on the cost of both systems. But the technology is coming. So for now, I’d say look at your investment on each end. Look at your maintenance and operation costs. Make the decision that’s best for you currently, but know that the technology is emerging and bigger, stronger, faster, more durable units will be coming.
Andy Johns: Oh yeah. It’s always working on something bigger and better. Well, John and Brad, thank you so much for joining me on this episode.
Brad & John: Thank you. Thank you.
Andy Johns: They are Brad Naylor and John Harkness. Both of them are with Central Georgia EMC in Jackson, Georgia. I’m your host, Andy Johns with Pioneer. And until we talk again, keep telling your story.
Outro: StoryConnect is produced by Pioneer Utility Resources, a communications cooperative that is built to share your story. StoryConnect is engineered by Lucas Smith of Lucky Sound Studio.