Rescuing Recourses
The people who lived in our house for 17 years before us had a whole system for watering the lawn with faucet manifolds and a few timers. They had been dragging hoses and sprinklers around the yard for years, spring through autumn.
They took almost all of it with them when they moved out. A couple of weeks into our first springtime, I realized that our previous homes with sprinkler systems made me lazy about lawn watering.
There was no way I was going to spend the time and energy to move hoses and sprinklers around all the time. We installed an in-ground sprinkler system ourselves that summer.
I used only one model of sprinkler head for the whole system for easy maintenance. For the controller I use a Rachio that uses logic to minimize water use and avoid run-off from oversaturation.
It connects wirelessly to my network and is managed with a phone app. It also skips if there’s rain and adjusts durations of each zone based on the weather. I set it to complete by sunrise and it adjusts its start times accordingly.
Turn it on in spring, check coverage to make sure everything works right, turn it off and winterize in late fall. I don’t think about it and my yard looks great. Story Credit: Reddit/Lobster70