According to the EPA as much as 70% of a home’s water use during the dry season goes to landscape irrigation and it is estimated that more than 50% of that landscape water is wasted due to overwatering or inefficient watering strategies.
Conserving water is becoming increasingly more important and one of the ways everyone can help is by learning how to water their landscaping efficiently.
Lawns don’t waste water, people do! You don’t have to give up having an aesthetically pleasing lawn to conserve water. Instead, you simply need to learn the best times to water so that it is not wasted by evaporation, and how much water your plants need so that you ensure you are not overwatering them.
Be sure that you choose the best plants for your region, the Nebraska Department of Agriculture has specialists knowledgeable about each region and has a wealth of information that can help you decide the best way to grow your lawn and garden.
Besides choosing plants that naturally grow well in your region, the best way to ensure you don’t waste the water that you are using to keep your lawn looking healthy, is by creating an efficient watering schedule. If you have a sprinkler system doing the watering for you, make sure it’s not running on a day that it’s going to rain.
Ensuring that you’re watering your lawn to save water, and money, takes daily research and for most people, that’s just not an option. If you’re too busy to do extensive research on watering times and adjusting your watering schedule appropriately, but you still want to conserve water while maintaining a beautiful lawn, the RainMachine may be the answer to your dilemma. Â
If you’re looking for a sprinkler system that has both WiFi connectivity and a Smart Phone App the RainMachine is the irrigation controller for you. The RainMachine is a smart sprinkler system that is easy to install and incredibly intuitive.
This irrigation system can forecast up to 7 days and then adjust your watering schedule accordingly. It uses real time temperature, wind, and rainfall data to calculate the Evotranspiration (ET) for you in order to schedule the most efficient watering times. If you’re science is a little rusty, Evotranspiration is the sum of evaporation, the movement of water to the air, and transpiration, the movement of water within a plant and the subsequent loss of water as vapor through its leaves.
Because the RainMachine calculates the most efficient times to run your sprinkler for you, it can help to dramatically reduce the amount of water you waste on your lawn each year. In fact, the product’s site claims that it can end up paying for itself in the first year.
