Water-Smart Gardening: Innovative Strategies for Lawn Irrigation
Smart watering is becoming easier than ever. New smart watering features connect with home monitoring systems, making it simple to save water, energy, time, and money.
Do you have a smart home system in place? Let’s look at how you could use it to nourish your lawn and garden with just the right amount of moisture.
Watering with Smart Home Systems
A smart watering system integrates multiple watering activities to give you better control. It allows you to easily adjust your sprinklers, misters, drip lines, water pressure, spray patterns, and other types of watering on your property.
Many of these systems can also track the weather to adapt automatically to previous precipitation averages. When you have a series of rainy days, they limit watering. During a drought, they provide extra moisture to protect your plants.
Smart watering systems naturally conserve water because they do all the tracking for you. Watering features can hook into your property’s overall smart home system for optimal control.
Imagine adjusting your sprinklers by saying, “Hey, Alexa.” Enjoy saving hundreds of dollars on your water bill by doing nothing—because your smart watering system is doing it all for you.
The Best Ways to Water Smart
Many people are unaware of innovative watering methods simply because they’ve never tried them. Here’s a quick overview of tips to make smart watering easier.
Drip Irrigation
Drip irrigation uses tubing and emitters to slowly distribute water to the right spots at the right times. Drip tubing can be placed at ground level or buried underground.
In this watering system, small emitters called drippers allow water to flow from the main distribution tubing in a custom arrangement for your landscaping. With the drip tubing and emitters placed close to individual plants, water soaks directly to the roots minimizing moisture loss from evaporation and runoff. This is an excellent way to maintain a vegetable garden or newly planted trees.
According to water absorption studies, drip irrigation can effectively cover 25% more area than the average sprinkler system, while a well-designed drip system typically delivers more than 95% water efficiency.
Cycle and Soak Method
One of the smartest ways to water your lawn without waste is through the time-tested cycle and soak method. This technique releases water in multiple shorter cycles allowing ample time to soak into the ground.
The on-and-off soaking rhythm allows plants the time they need to absorb water fully. Plants and tree roots can’t take on too much water at once or they’ll become waterlogged and resist absorption.
Use the cycle and soak method to keep your yard healthy and vibrant. Generally, a 60-minute soaking cycle is best for the average home. This means the grass and plants have a full hour to absorb water before another timed soak begins.
Smart Timers
Smart timers make it easy to water successfully, even if you know little about irrigation.
Rain Bird ARC Series smart irrigation controllers are a simple way to get started with smart home watering. They connect through your home’s WiFi, so you can control them from your mobile device. You can even speak to them through Amazon Alexa or the Google Assistant.
To program the controller, select one of three programs to customize based on the conditions for your yard. From there, you can set it to make automatic adjustments according to soil type, seasonal weather averages or forecasted rain.
For example, with rising temperatures, your landscape may require more water. The problem with watering in long durations is you may start to get runoff or pooling if you have heavy soils or a sloped zone that is easily oversaturated. Knowing this, your controller can automatically break the watering up into multiple “cycles” with a period of “soak” in between. Moisture deep in the soil promotes deeper roots, which contributes to a thicker, healthier, greener lawn.
Or, when incremental weather is forecasted, this controller can use highly accurate, internet-sourced local weather data based on the zip code input during set-up to automatically delay watering without a separate rain sensor.
Rain Bird has found that these controllers reduce typical water usage by up to 30%. They can also help homeowners meet local watering restrictions, which occur often in water-sensitive areas like California and the desert southwest.
Making a Difference with Smart Watering
Smart watering makes a positive impact that’s especially noticeable in the long term. You could save thousands of gallons of water per year, lightening the load on the environment and lowering your water bill.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that the typical U.S. household uses 70% of its water for indoor household needs and 30% for outdoor yard watering. But in arid zones, outdoor watering can be as much as 60% of total water use.
Without smart features in place, as much as half of all outdoor watering is lost to evaporation, runoff, and wind. You can use smart watering products, including those on the EPA’s WaterSense-certified list, to noticeably limit water loss.
Well-designed irrigation controllers can save as much as $500 and 15,000 gallons of water per household per year. Every drop matters.
If you’re ready to upgrade your home to be more water-smart, take a look at Rain Bird’s online store with timers, controllers, drip irrigators, and sprayers. We aim to take the stress out of watering so you can enjoy your yard every season.
