Running a Cost-Saving Irrigation System

Having an sprinkler system is an easy way for you to keep the grass and plants in your yard properly watered. However, if you aren’t careful with how you use your irrigation system, it could dramatically raise your water bill, and you will lose a lot of money. If you want to save money and energy with your sprinklers, take a look at the following tips.

 

Know When to Run Your Sprinklers

 

One way to save money with your irrigation system is to know when you should run the sprinklers. When you keep the sprinklers running for too long, the only thing you end up doing is wasting water. There are times when you don’t need to have the sprinklers on, and it is important that you know about them so you don’t have to worry about water being wasted.

Generally, the best time to turn on the sprinklers is early in the morning, as the air tends to be cooler during this time. This will let the grass and plants get properly watered before all the sprinkler water evaporates. In addition, if you know it is going to rain in the near future, you should probably leave the sprinklers off. The rain will do a good enough job watering everything for you, so leaving the sprinklers on in this case would be overkill.

Use an Irrigation Controller

If you want to make it easier to manage your irrigation system, you might want to get yourself an irrigation controller. It can be a challenge to manually keep your sprinkler system in check, as sometimes you might forget to turn off the sprinklers when you didn’t need them on. Things like this can lead to a much heftier water bill, so this is where the irrigation controller comes in.

An irrigation controller is a device that essentially serves as a thermostat for your sprinkler system, as it uses weather data that will tell the sprinkler system how long it should run for. The device will decide when the sprinklers should be on, and can regulate how often irrigation needs to occur. This will save you bundles of money in the long run, as the controller will make sure the sprinklers only run at the proper times.

Inspect Your System Regularly

It is important that you routinely check on your irrigation system, because a faulty system can end up being quite costly. If there is a leak in the pipes used for your sprinklers, gallons of water could be wasted. Most of these pipes run underground, so there could be a leak costing you money and you wouldn’t even know about it. You want to do routine inspections on your sprinkler system so you can make sure it works properly.

It can be difficult to take care of this maintenance yourself, so it would be wise to sign up for an irrigation system maintenance plan, as this will let a professional take care of it for you. Hillsborough offers sprinkler services, so you can have your sprinkler system inspected so issues can be dealt with before they start costing you money. In addition, it would be wise to do some research on what can cause damaged sprinkler systems so you can prevent these issues from happening in the first place.

Divide Up Your Plants

Another good way to save money on irrigation is to divide up your plants based on how much water they need. Certain plants need more water than others, so if you bunch them up with plants that don’t need as much water, some plants will get overwatered. On top of this, the grass also needs a different amount of water than the plants do, so it would be wise to divide up the plants so you can cut down on how much water you need to use overall.

The goal is to put plants that have similar needs in water together so you can easily keep track of how much water each plant needs. You should also set up your sprinklers so they can give the grass a proper amount of water as well. Once this is done, you can have the sprinklers hit certain areas for as long as they need to. This will guarantee that overwatering will not be an issue, and your water bill will go down a bit.

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