Monday, November 1st, 2010

Course Conditions
As I write this the course has received 3.10 inches of rain in the past 7 days. The weather pattern sure seemed to go from good to not so good all in a short period of time. Despite all the rain we were still able to get the carts out on the fairway at least a couple times last week. The course is still pretty firm and we want to get as many days on the course as possible. I am anticipating that we we will be putting the ropes up on 12 and 15 fairway pretty soon.
The fairway fertilizer has kicked in and is showing some good color. The growth isn’t that much which is nice. I think we timed it pretty good with the onset of the cooler temperatures.
Mike sprayed the greens Wednesday for anthracnose. Anthracnose has been pretty persistent this year, especially on 16. We are hoping this will put an end to it for the season. I think I have put together a pretty good fungicide program for next year. I switched it up a bit from last year by changing the rotation of the fungicides and going with different classes of chemistries. There are a lot of new products on the market today with very low use rates. These are generally the products that we like to use. Friday the rain stayed away long enough for us to fertilize the greens as well. We will soon be cutting back to one application a month for the winter season.
We went ahead and mowed all of the bunker faces last week and gave them all a fresh new look. Thursday was pretty much spent pushing the sand back in place and raking them out after the heavy rain. The crew has been doing awesome work, I can’t say enough about them. Currently down two members, they are pulling together and are doing some great work. Please be sure to let them know when you run into them.
Power Savings
I wanted to insert these tables showing our current power savings in the cart barn and in the maintenance shop since May, after our Energy Trust of Oregon lighting upgrade. I compared the cost to the previous 3 year average.
Maintenance Shop

	3 Year Average	2010 Power Bill	% Savings
May	$ 378.93	$ 279.72	26.18%
June	$ 319.96	$ 295.91	7.52%
July	$ 288.67	$ 211.11	26.87%
August	$ 306.67	$ 204.12	33.44%
September	$ 209.95	$ 233.81	19.64%
October	$ 370.21	$ 205.60	33.08%
		Average Savings	24.45%

Cart Barn

	3 Year Average	2010 Power Bill	% Savings
May	$ 778.86	$ 642.07	17.56%
June	$ 939.86	$ 795.52	15.36%
July	$ 1,103.40	$ 774.21	29.83%
August	$ 1,287.90	$ 927.40	27.99%
September	$ 928.52	$ 834.34	10.14%
October	$ 1,014.42	$ 805.70	20.58%
		Average Savings	20.24%

As you can see the savings is pretty significant. In those two buildings we have saved a total of $1,735.85!  I am still perplexed over the clubhouse since the savings are pretty flat. We need to look into that a little further and see what other cost saving measures could be implemented to improve that score. This winter the first place to start will be to make sure the thermostats are programed and we secure them to keep them from getting adjusted.
We have invited Gil Amestoy from EOFF and The Energy Trust of Oregon to speak at our upcoming OGCSA Environmental Meeting on November 9th. I hope that other facilities will take advantage of this program and see the same kind of savings we are experiencing.
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