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A Smart Lawn Sprinkler System?
An anonymous reader asks: "I'm about to install a sprinkler system for my lawn. There are lots of timers and computers out there to automate the watering of your lawn. However, before I go out and buy something, I wanted to know if there are any interesting open source projects for watering lawns. I've heard about smart sprinklers that get weather from the internet/satellite and water accordingly. What have other Slashdot readers done?"
I quite agree. We replaced the lawn in our backgarden with a patio area adjacent to the house and some steps up (it's on a hill) to an area of decking surrounded by bushes, gravel, woodchip, and so on. It looks much better and is much easier to maintain than some browny-yellowy grass rectangle (which is the colour most lawns end up during the summer months).
I've held this opinion of lawns for some time; grass serves very little useful purpose. The problem is that it's what's expected of everyone to have. I hope that you never have to sell your house; your yard situation will discourage quite a few potential clients. I've even heard of places where neighborhood communities complained about somebody's non-standard lawn arrangements to the appropriate town council and forced a change.
Alternative lawns are awesome. But if you're ever planning on selling your house...
Love the Third Amendment?
I so don't miss our lawn, ripped it out ASAP. Front yard is all native plants and herbs, backyard is vines and flowers. The kiddies have what's left of the flagstone patio that the previous owners put in... what's left is not a lot as my son likes to pry up the flagstones looking for bugs.
A previous poster mentioned subsurface drip... there were sprinklers in place for the lawn, so I replaced all their heads with four-way splitters feeding lengths of thin drip hose with little half-circle sprayers on the end for plants that need more water. The hoses are all under dirt and cedar chip, it uses much less water, and hardly any of the water is evaporating away before the plants get it. Cheap, easily adjustable, highly recommended. Won't work for a grass lawn though.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Sorry, I must be missing something. How are sprinklers incompatible with watering at (say) 5 AM? All the timers I see at the local home improvement store are electronic and perfectly capable of watering, e.g. every third day at 5:30 for 15 minutes.
The one I've got (can't remember the brand) is pretty easy to reprogram, so I constantly tweak the program to changing weather patterns.
I installed a sprinkler system in my house when it was built ~2 years ago.
First thing, have a plumber come in and install a deduct-meter (if your house isn't new you can probably do it yourself. I couldn't, I'd lose my plumbing warranty for the first few years).
Then shop around for controllers. I bought one that had plenty of extra space for valve control, as well as weather control, master water valve controller etc etc.
Then get your trusty plot plan out and figure out where things are going to go. Try to imagine the future too - because you can always trench extra lines while you have your yard torn up. But going back and trenching in add'l lines (like I was digging this evening till the mosquito's came out) just sucks.
So plan plan plan!
As far as being geeky with it - some of the controllers have serial ports. For me, this wasn't a priority. The controllers (atleast mine) has a good interface, and it's easy to set and configure. Even though I have a few linux boxes sitting in the basement next to it, I've not had the urge to try and wire it into the LAN and play. I don't know that I ever will.
Hope that helps.
Oh - be sure to investigate micro-irrigation. I just found out about this stuff on Saturday. The heads are tiny and come in various (even bendable) formats. No trenching involved. It'll even do hanging plants. Once we put the beds into the backyard and the plants in the spring I'll be running the mico-stuff everywhere that I can. I wish I'd have known about it when I setup my front yard with Pro-sprays.
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