Nobody tells you that you need an irrigation system, the politically correct way to say "Sprinkler System", anymore. I think this is because water authorities would rather have customers use less water, and one way to do that is to make it extremely inconvenient for you to significantly water your yard, since yard watering is the #1 residential usage of water, and greatly exceeds all other home uses of water for those people who do actually water their yards. Even if a professionally installed irrigation system does save water compared to ad hoc sprinkler and hose methods of watering an entire yard, not watering at all uses the least amount of water at all, and without an automatic system, most likely you are not going to be watering an entire yard because it is a lot of work.
While I agree in part that it is desireable that water usage be kept fairly low, I suggest that mainly be done by keeping population and therefore the total number of homes fairly low. Nowadays, water authorities seem to be in the political grip of developers, who would rather build new homes, often much fancier new homes than the existing median home. These fancy new homes *sometimes* have expensive landscaping featuring xeriscaping, in the show models, to show the hoi polloi what they should be doing rather than just irrigation their plain old lawn. But in the run of the mill fancy homes in the fancy gated communities developers like to build homes in there are more likely more ordinary and less costly lawn-based yards with automatic sprinkler systems because fancy home buyers would accept nothing less than full automation, and in fact they need it to keep up with the homeowner's association which mandates green grass.
I might also point out that the residential use of water is only a tiny slice, 10-20%, of the total water used in most places. The rest is used, often wastefully, in industry and agriculture. But of course, those activities are about making money, and making money by waste is just what we do.
So full sprinkler systems are fine, even mandatory in expensive new development, while the rest of us in older cheaper homes can rot. Well no more, not for me! In a year of making huge transformations to my home and yard, adding automatic irrigation has obviously been one of the biggest transformations.
It was doubly important for me. Even if I were willing to let the lawn dry up and blow away, and I basically was--mostly, I need to keep the ground moist because the hard clay soil cracks and shifts frighteningly during long droughts. So it was not uncommon that I would spend 2 hours a week from April through October. And still, I missed enough weeks that I had signficant soil cracking and shifting, and with all that work I still had lawns that went from lousy to horrible.
I have a little crack in the master bedroom wall near the ceiling that serves as a moisture gauge. Typically it starts getting wider (from about invisible to credit card thickness) in about April, and peaks around September, is back to narrow in January.
This year, the intense summer rain kept the crack from growing. It was just barely starting to grow in August when the irrigation system was installed. Now it is back to winter thickness.
Just after the irrigation system was installed, we entered severe Mosquito weather. If I had to continue long sessions of late night watering, I would certainly have had to face them.
Plus I was having trouble, spending hours a day, just keeping 3 trees alive. Now I have 12 trees, pretty much automatically watered (though I like the give the little palm in front a bit more than it gets from the lawn sprinkler there...that was a last minute relocation for the palm and it will be relocated again).
One more important point about all this, is that even though automatic irrigation makes it far easier to use more water by watering your yard consistently and fully, it saves a lot of water compared to what would be required to do all this by other means, even hose watering.
Hose watering is fairly efficient if you really know what you are doing. But hose watering significant areas of lawn is very time consuming, and it's very difficult to do it uniformly. So what you end up doing is watering more than you need overall, and still there are areas that don't get enough.
I was using about twice as much water the month after I planted my back lawn in 2008 than I used so far in 2012 after planting twelve new trees and watering front, back and sides with an automatic system.
This suggests to me that the automatic system is about four times as efficient as my previous hose and sprinkler methods. Plus it really gets the job done, something I was never able to do before, and it does it consistently and uniformly.
I don't know how I got by without it.
While I agree in part that it is desireable that water usage be kept fairly low, I suggest that mainly be done by keeping population and therefore the total number of homes fairly low. Nowadays, water authorities seem to be in the political grip of developers, who would rather build new homes, often much fancier new homes than the existing median home. These fancy new homes *sometimes* have expensive landscaping featuring xeriscaping, in the show models, to show the hoi polloi what they should be doing rather than just irrigation their plain old lawn. But in the run of the mill fancy homes in the fancy gated communities developers like to build homes in there are more likely more ordinary and less costly lawn-based yards with automatic sprinkler systems because fancy home buyers would accept nothing less than full automation, and in fact they need it to keep up with the homeowner's association which mandates green grass.
I might also point out that the residential use of water is only a tiny slice, 10-20%, of the total water used in most places. The rest is used, often wastefully, in industry and agriculture. But of course, those activities are about making money, and making money by waste is just what we do.
So full sprinkler systems are fine, even mandatory in expensive new development, while the rest of us in older cheaper homes can rot. Well no more, not for me! In a year of making huge transformations to my home and yard, adding automatic irrigation has obviously been one of the biggest transformations.
It was doubly important for me. Even if I were willing to let the lawn dry up and blow away, and I basically was--mostly, I need to keep the ground moist because the hard clay soil cracks and shifts frighteningly during long droughts. So it was not uncommon that I would spend 2 hours a week from April through October. And still, I missed enough weeks that I had signficant soil cracking and shifting, and with all that work I still had lawns that went from lousy to horrible.
I have a little crack in the master bedroom wall near the ceiling that serves as a moisture gauge. Typically it starts getting wider (from about invisible to credit card thickness) in about April, and peaks around September, is back to narrow in January.
This year, the intense summer rain kept the crack from growing. It was just barely starting to grow in August when the irrigation system was installed. Now it is back to winter thickness.
Just after the irrigation system was installed, we entered severe Mosquito weather. If I had to continue long sessions of late night watering, I would certainly have had to face them.
Plus I was having trouble, spending hours a day, just keeping 3 trees alive. Now I have 12 trees, pretty much automatically watered (though I like the give the little palm in front a bit more than it gets from the lawn sprinkler there...that was a last minute relocation for the palm and it will be relocated again).
One more important point about all this, is that even though automatic irrigation makes it far easier to use more water by watering your yard consistently and fully, it saves a lot of water compared to what would be required to do all this by other means, even hose watering.
Hose watering is fairly efficient if you really know what you are doing. But hose watering significant areas of lawn is very time consuming, and it's very difficult to do it uniformly. So what you end up doing is watering more than you need overall, and still there are areas that don't get enough.
I was using about twice as much water the month after I planted my back lawn in 2008 than I used so far in 2012 after planting twelve new trees and watering front, back and sides with an automatic system.
This suggests to me that the automatic system is about four times as efficient as my previous hose and sprinkler methods. Plus it really gets the job done, something I was never able to do before, and it does it consistently and uniformly.
I don't know how I got by without it.
No comments:
Post a Comment