"Doug Lassiter" wrote in message
om...
Here comes summer, and here comes voluntary water rationing. A good
thing. Encourages smart water use and proper lawn care. But then
there's this business about your own special watering day. Huh? Let's
see. My neighbor -- the one with miles of PVC pipe under his lawn and
a controller that is perfectly happy drenching things when it's
pouring outside (but hey, only every five days!) appears to use
awesome amounts. Here I am with hoses, sprinkler attachments, $10
water volume regulators/timers, and one or two faucets feeding them
trying to water a lawn by just moving them around day after day the
old fashioned way. Doing it when I can, and where I can.

Now, I really don't need anyone to tell me that because they see one
of my sprinklers on what is not *my* day I'm not rationing properly.
Believe it or not, that has happened! (Now, otherwise I live in a
great neighborhood!)

Water conservation is as much about output as it is capacity. Let's say
everyone in a large city waters their lawn only once per week, but everyone
does it on the same day. It's easy to see the system would quickly get
overwhelmed. However if the watering is distributed equally over the entire
week, the same amount of water is being used, but the system is not being
overwhelmed.

Everyone in my neighborhood has an in-ground system (it was installed by the
builders for all homes). But it never fails I see several people's systems
going off right in the middle of a rainstorm. The first thing I did to my
system was to install a rain sensor. After a good hard rain, I set the rain
delay on my controller for a week.

For years I would drag hoses around. Now that I have a sprinkler system,
I'll never go back. It's a great way to go, but you really do need to
augment the controller with a little common sense.