mcangeli
Loading ... I’ve blogged a lot lately about the lack of rain (except for this week for some reason) in the Atlanta area due to the drought. The problems of the drought have pretty much caused my lawn and gardens to transform from something I could be a little happy with to brown and crackly messes that I just want to tear out and do all over again (but I won’t. At least, not yet). Most of it is caused by the restrictions on watering that have been imposed due to the drought which could have been avoided with a little bit of careful planing. For instance, earlier in the year, the sprinklers at the entrance to the hood would run even in the rain. wasting who knows how much water. Thats a common problem with many of the sprinkler systems, they lack a rain detector.
There’s a new player in the market though, that really really looks promising. The advances made in home automation have been great over the past couple of years. Cyber-Rain.com wants to take it a step farther by linking your sprinkler systems to your home PC for better automation and management and I think its a cool idea. We had an estimate done earlier in the summer for a new lawn and sprinkler system. We didn’t do it (the price was a little more than we were prepared for) but I may look again at a sprinkler system, especially if I can get cyber rain installed.
The coolest thing about this is that it automagically adjusts the watering schedule based on weather reports that it downloads from the net. HOW FREAKING AWESOME IS THAT?? Its a simple box that adds on to your sprinkler system, it connects to your network wirelessly via 802.11g protocol and you can control everything from your PC/mac/whatever. I think that is worth it in itself. The time, energy and water you could save with this system would pay for itself in the matter of months. Is anyone out there using a solution like this already? Have you seen any benefit from it??
| 2.8 (1 person) |
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October 30th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
I would love to get one of these for my yard
October 30th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
At the university I attend they do the same thing, water in the rain and after the rain. Since I’ve seen these thing come on, go off for the night and then come back on when it rains I have to really wonder what kind of system our university uses. Since we’re out here in the desert it’s doubly a waste of water. =/ But that’s my college for ya!
I would send the head of landscaping and grounds maintenance a link to that so that they might get a clue, but I have to wonder if it would do any good.
October 30th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Our grass has been the same way. It went from green and nice to brown and razorblade-like! That Cyber Rain is awesome though! That is something that would definitely be good for when it does rain a whole bunch but yet you still see people watering their lawn! haha I like the idea they have there! I can imagine that getting a new sprinkler system would be very spendy!