Greener yards and less watering blues
Summer's around the corner, and that means warmer weather and the potential for increased watering to maintain your yard and landscaping looking cool and green. How much more water is needed? Well, that depends on factors like evapotranspiration (ET) rate and the watering index (WI) and...you with me so far? I didn't think so, but that's perfectly OK!
Let me introduce to you the better mousetrap of irrigation timers and controllers, the . Cyber-Rain is a ground-breaking control system that utilizes up-to-date local weather information taken from www.weather.com, factors in the WI if necessary, and allows for easy user configuration of up to eight irrigation zones. Need more than eight zones? Simply add another eight zone controller. Oh, I forgot to mention...the controller configures and communicates with your PC wirelessly, too!
The Cyber-Rain control system kit consists of the eight zone controller, power supply, a USB wireless access point and cable, and software. If you loose internet connection and the controller is no longer receiving periodic weather updates, the controller will take into account the watering index for your region. Initially after installation, there is a little bit of fine tuning required to make sure each zone is getting the right amount of water, but this is easily done through the user interface. After that, Cyber-Rain takes over from there.
So what is evapotranspiration? Briefly, it is the amount of water, in the form of water vapor, lost to the atmosphere by the combination of evaporation from the soil and transpiration from plant leaves, transpiration meaning evaporation through plant matter. Here's some nuggets of information for you to ponder...An acre of corn gives off about 3,000-4,000 gallons of water each day, and a large oak tree can transpire 40,000 gallons per year. Now that's a lot of water!
And the watering index? It's regional weather-related historical data that provides the recommended amount of water to use depending on the month of the year for a given location.
This post is both a New Product and a Tech Note, but since I threw in two landscaping techno terms, I posted it as a Tech Note. And thanks to the Georgia Water Science Center for providing the nuggets of info.