Types of Smart Watering

Watering Manually

Watering manually is the baseline watering solution and outperforms not watering your yard in most environments. This level includes everything from using a watering can to spot water specific plants in your yard to using a product like an oscillating sprinkler a couple times a week to water a large section of grass with even coverage. The problem with manual watering is that it requires you, the homeowner, to remember and make time to water your yard on a regular basis. The upside of watering manually is that an attentive homeowner can look for the signals that plants give to let you know that they are thirsty to help provide the correct amount of water.

Watering With a Traditional Controller

Watering with a traditional sprinkler controller or timer is a step up in watering intelligence because it starts to remove human error from the system. You can program your timer to run on a specific schedule and know that your plants are being taken care of. Most commonly, people do this with an underground sprinkler timer but you can also get similar results with a hose faucet timer and a set of above ground sprinklers and hoses. This also allows you to take advantage of watering your plants at the optimal time of day as opposed to what works best in your schedule.

Watering With Rain Delay

Think of the last time that you were driving during a rainstorm, and you looked out the car window and saw someone’s sprinklers watering their lawn. Remember how embarrassed you felt when you realized that it was your lawn? It happens to the best of us. A rain sensor detects water and will put your system into a rain delay to prevent watering in the rain. Most underground sprinkler timers support an external rain/freeze sensor and the installation can be tackled by most homeowners in about an hour depending on the location of your sprinkler controller.

Watering With Seasonal Adjustments

Seasonal Adjust is where watering starts to get smart. Think about the weather where you live, do you dress the same way in January that you do in April or July? Probably not. In the same way, the amount of water your plants need depends on the weather. Many sprinkler controllers have a seasonal adjust function that will let you proportionally dial up or down the time that your timer spends watering each zone to compensate for the time of year.

Most of us are lazy and end up turning on our timer at the beginning of the watering season and then turning it off at the end and forget that the timer is there as long as the grass is looking good. The change of weather trends from one month to another get forgotten, but adjusting the watering levels every 3-4 weeks can make a big difference in the health of your lawn and the savings on your water bill. It can take some experimentation to do this manually, but most smart timers (and all B-hyve devices) will allow you to do this without lifting a finger.

Watering With Current Weather Information

Using actual weather information is the next step up from seasonal watering in accuracy and water savings. It makes sense intuitively that if your plants need a certain amount of water on a 60-degree day that they would need more water on a day that reaches 100 degrees. Using actual weather data points is much more accurate than monthly generalities.

B-hyve sprinkler controllers are constantly monitoring the current weather and they use that information to calculate how much water your plants and soil have lost through evapotranspiration (the process of plants consuming and losing water), this information is then used to build a watering plan that changes as your weather changes, resulting in a great looking lawn that uses less water.

Watering With Predictive Weather Information

No matter where you’re from, you’ve likely heard the phrase “If you don’t like the weather, wait 10 minutes.” While most people tend to think their region is unique in its weather fluctuations, the fact is that large changes in temperature and precipitation can happen anywhere. Most smart sprinkler controllers use current and historical weather data to calculate the water needs of your plants, but what happens when your plants are drying out right before a rain storm is about to roll through your neighborhood?

B-hyve timers use multiple weather forecasts with predictive information timed to the minute, combined with current and past weather data, to ensure your sprinklers know what the current weather is and what’s coming. This lets B-hyve build an even smarter watering plan for your yard that can change as often as the weather does, meaning you’ll avoid watering in the morning if you’re going to get rain in the afternoon.