Rick Tegtmeier, CGCS said: Cody,
They are called data loggers. You can purchase them very cheap on Amazon. Most people buy a data logger and use it while doing outdoor pursuits like hiking, running, biking etc.
I bought a couple of Canmore Sport Log Book off of Amazon for around $45. I would give them to employees in the morning who were mowing fairways or walk mowing greens just to see how many miles they were going in a day or seeing what routing they took. I was shocked that we were doing almost 30 miles a day just in 1 fairway mower. It was good information because you could then compute how many times you mowed a year, how old the mower was and how many miles were on it versus hours. Nice information to have when you were trying to justify a new mower or purchase an additional one. I would move the gps data from the Canmore software to Google Earth and it would lay over the top of the map of the golf course. Crude but you still get a good idea of things.
Jim Moore from the USGA gave the talk and he was placing the data logger on top of a golf cart to track traffic patterns versus areas that golfers might be hitting the ball. Possibly reducing out of play areas. All good information if you want to get that in depth.
All pretty easy and I would be happy to try and help you if you buy one.
Rick
I listened to Jim Moore's presentation last winter at the Ohio Turfgrass Foundation Conference, and after his talk I purchased 6 of the Canmore Data Loggers for use at our facility. I used them extensively throughout the season and have a lot of great data. We are a municipal golf course, so any time I can give detailed physical data to City Administration and City Council, it makes us much more credible. Not only will the data loggers track mileage like Rick was saying, we use them to track exact man-hour requirements for daily tasks. We were blown away with some of the information that we received, especially the difference in mileage and time of various mowing patterns, directions, and whether or not a cleanup was done. The data can be exported to Google Earth, color coded and overlaid so that you can see traffic patterns of your staff and correct wear areas on the course. At the end of the season, I used the data to provide maintenance costs for many of the common practices at our facility. Here is an example of our costs to mow greens for the season:
Average duration to mow greens: 4 hours 14 minutes
Average distance traveled to mow greens: 14.28 miles
Average number of times greens are mowed annually: 210
Average amount of fuel used to mow greens: 1.8 gallons
Seasonal man-hours to mow greens: 889 man-hours
Seasonal distance traveled to mow greens: 2998.8 miles
Seasonal amount of fuel used to mow greens: 378 gallons
Labor cost to mow greens for season (including payroll taxes): $9236.71
Estimated fuel cost for the season ($2.25/gal): $850.50
Total labor and fuel cost to mow greens for the season: $10,087.21