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 With water conservation one of the things at the forefront of people's minds today, examining your garden's existing sprinkler system is a good place to start. An efficient sprinkler system can help you cut down on your water bill while helping the planet.
When homeowners ask how they can save water in terms of their gardens, Jim Scarborough, who has been the Landscape Design Consultant/Production Manager for H & H Nursery in Lakewood, California, for 24 years, says, “If there’s one thing that I think people should do, over and above everything else, is to have their sprinkler system evaluated. By a professional, not by a gardener. By a professional who knows what things he can tell you to save water with an irrigation system.”
With regard to sprinkler system timers, Scarborough prefers percentage timers to standard timers.
He says you can set a percentage timer at 100% in the summer, and dial it down to 30% in the winter. This means if you have the timer coming on 10 minutes in the summer, in the winter, it is going to come on 3 minutes. So what you’re doing is enabling yourself, by the percentage points, to figure how much water your plants need.
"Normally, I tell people," Scarborough says about determining how much water your plants need, "start out at 3 minutes. If they (the plants) are drooping, go up to 4. If they're still drooping, go to 5, and if they’re fine, that's it."
If you’ve set your percentage sprinkler timer for 10 minutes, use the same procedure, but cycle it down. Find the number of minutes it takes for your plants not to droop, and stick with that number. That’s how you’ll save water.
Scarborough says, "The biggest problem with sprinkler systems is people will have timers, and they are afraid of them, number one, and number two, is all timers have a default; a fail-safe. This means if the power goes off in your house, they’ll come on—all the stations will come on every day for 10 minutes. And that’s so if you’re gone during the summer, or a vacation, and you have a power outage, the computer will hold the default program. So when the power comes back on, it’ll be that program."
Reverting to the default program could pose problems not so much in the summer but in the winter, because with the default set to water 10 minutes a day, and the power outage occurring while the residents are on vacation, say, for Christmas or another occasion, the flowers and plants would be getting watered 10 minutes every day. The residents could arrive home to find everything in their garden dead because it’s been over-watered.
He says a lot of the older timers had batteries that you had to put in. But if you don’t check them regularly to see if they are still good, it could pose a problem in the event of a disruption in power. Most of the new timers today have the battery already in the unit, so when you have it plugged in, it’s charging the battery that’s already there.
"The batteries are good for about three days," Scarborough says, "and then they run out. But the power’s never down three days."
Scarborough recommends to, "invest $60 in a good timer. That's going to save you more than that much in water."
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