Tutorial - MWELO

MWELO applies to the following:

New construction projects: Landscapes with an aggregate area equal to or greater than 500 square feet requiring a building or landscape permit, plan check, or design review.
Rehabilitated landscape projects: Existing landscapes with an aggregate area equal to or greater than 2,500 square feet that are modified and require a building or landscape permit, plan check, or design review.
Existing landscapes: While not directly regulated, MWELO provides guidelines for improving water efficiency in existing landscapes.

Preliminary Design

Based on a preliminary landscape design, establish the following parameters:

Tentative hydrozones and determine their square footage. Assign a hydrozone number to each one.
Pool/spa square footage. Consider all water surfaces in your design (pool, spa, hot tub, fountain, in-ground water feature)

This is the baseline information you will need to run the MWELO tool. When entering the information of each hydrozone, the tool will prompt you to enter the plant species of each zone. You may have a pre-selection, or choose the species as you go. Water requirements of each plant species will be provided by the MWELO tool at that stage.

Getting Started

Navigate to the validator tool on the website by clicking into My Project in our main menu.
Insert your access token in order to enable the validator tool and press the SUBMIT button at the top right of the screen
You will see a main dashboard with it's own menu, including options for general information input about your project, managing your hydrozones, choosing your pool / spa dimensions, check your project validation and creating the compliant final report.

Entering Hydrozone Data

For each hydrozone in your landscape design:

Click "Add a Hydrozone"
Input the surface area in square feet
Input the irrigation method (drip or overhead)

Note: Where possible, define a separate Hydrozone for each tree.

Adding Plants to a Hydrozone

Use the searchable dropdown list to select each plant species you want to place
Select into which hydrozone the plant will be added
Confirm by pressing the + Add plant button
Repeat for all plants in each hydrozone
When finished (or at any time) please save your work by pressing the SUBMIT button at the top right corner of the validation tool

Note: For each selected plant the MWELO tool will automatically calculate the water requirement based on the species

Additional Compliance elements

Pool/Spa: If your design includes a pool or spa or other built water feature, enter its surface area in the designated field.

Editing before validating

You can edit existing hydrozones by selecting them from the list.

Tips

You can always use the MWELO tool after you have designed your garden. However, we recommend using it while designing, in order to test your ideas and hydrozones.

It is highly recommended to group plants in hydrozones according to water requirements, e.g. if you plan to use some “moderate water” species, define a hydrozone for them. When you add one “moderate water” plant in a given hydrozone, the whole hydrozone becomes a “moderate water” one.

Turf is not acceptable for validation. Instead of turf or lawn areas, choose groundcover species such as Dymondia or Kurapia. They work well as turf alternatives.

Native California species will work best for a proper validation. However, a combination of Native and non-Native species with VERY LOW, LOW and some MODERATE water requirement species will produce an attractive and water efficient garden.

Finalizing the Design Validation

Once all hydrozones and pool / spa information is up to your satisfaction and the Mwelo Tool shows no validation problems, you will be able to close your project and generate the compliance pdf report.

Navigate into the Report tab
Confirm you want to close your project by clicking on the red button
The MWELO tool will generate the water efficiency validation report based on MWELO requirements.