Irrigreen prints the water in the exact shape of your lawn.
This may not seem timely with fall coming and winter coming soon. But depending on where you live, you might be watering your lawn year-round (lucky you, warm weather readers).
You might therefore be interested in the latest from Irrigreen: “digital smart sprinklers designed to reinvent irrigation”. They are also said to cut water usage by more than half, eliminating wasted water (from the imperfect sprinkler that waters your driveway, for example). And of course, spring and summer will return soon enough for us who are currently enjoying the fall leaves and preparing for snow.
Irrigreen, based in California and Minnesota, introduced its 2.0 system in 2021. Recently, they unveiled XP, a fancier name for the 3.0 system, the “industry’s most advanced robotic watering system to date “.
Irrigreen systems are built using inkjet printing technology to digitally control water placement. In other words, they are much better than your typical system or method for moving the hose around your garden. The system “prints” water onto your land exactly where it is needed, reducing water consumption by 50%, according to the company.
Irrigreen CEO Shawn Dyer said XP has been launched across the United States. The main locations are in Texas and California (where it’s over 70 degrees Fahrenheit in mid-October). Most of the facilities are residential, but commercial and municipal projects are on the horizon.
Dyer says the company sees a large number of homeowners willing to do it themselves design their own irrigation system using Irrigreen’s innovative online tool.
“The tool lets you see a Google Earth view of your home and ‘place’ digital heads in the yard to see how many you need for full coverage. We can also look at three years of rainfall and temperature data to determine how much water the project will save each year compared to a traditional mechanical system. »
Shane Dyer, CEO of Irrigreen
Buying it must be painful to install. No, said Dyer.
“Installing an Irrigreen digital sprinkler system is much easier for a DIYer or landscape contractor, as a typical yard only needs five sprinkler heads versus 40 sprinkler heads with a mechanical system. traditional.
“It also means 80% less trenching and PVC pipe, making the job about three times faster to install. Additionally, traditional automatic valves are no longer required, saving even more time and eliminating a mechanical component that could fail or leak. Irrigreen is a much simpler irrigation system.
For those who already have a buried system: Dyer says 80% of his business is retrofitting existing sprinkler systems to use Irrigreen’s digital sprinkler heads. “It speeds up installation, as existing piping can be reused. In almost all cases, the old sprinkler heads are simply covered and not removed, so that the yard does not need to be dug up unnecessarily.
The 50% water savings with the Irrigreen system are backed by science, says Dyer.
The Fresno State Center for Irrigation Technology in California conducted a study on Irrigreen’s digital heads compared to traditional mechanical sprinkler head technology and found that for the same soil moisture, Irrigreen saved about 40% of the water used, the company notes.
“It’s just water savings thanks to Irrigreen’s water-based printing technology with the digital heads”, says the CEO. “When we add the water savings of Irrigreen’s web-based weather-based irrigation system, we get more than 50% savings,” according to another California study.
Those savings mean lower water bills and conservation of water resources at a time when drought is increasingly threatening the country, Dyer says.
Irigreen has existed since 2014 and holds 35 patents on inkjet technology. The company still considers itself a startup (300% growth in the last year, according to Dyer).
And starting the system is less expensive for owners because fewer heads are needed.
A comparison between the sprinkler heads needed for a mechanical system (left) and Irrigreen (right).
XP heads are $363. “The average cost for our complete system is $1,800 for up to 1,500 square feet (and) $3,800 for up to 11,000 square feet.
“The XP heads have the advantage of having both pressure and flow sensors in each head and use machine learning to predict and adapt to changes in water pressure for the best accuracy, especially for neighborhoods where water pressure varies.”
The conventional lawn pictured here is 5,500 square feet.
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