Its Time to Check Your Irrigation Schedule

Inside Water Meter reading

Water Meter on curbside

Now that the rainy weather is here, as budgetgardeners, we need to re-schedule our irrigation timers and reduce unnecessary usage of water.  Plants are less active in their growth during winter seasons and with a weekly rainfall coming our way,  we can just turn off our irrigation system until the soil dries up.

 I was reviewing my water bills recently and to my surprise, the irrigation system uses a lot of water far more than I realized.  In  our area, the water meter is located by the curb under a concrete slab cover.  The meter reading is done every other month in our area, manually, by taking the digital numbers on the meter and writing them down, recording the numbers on our water bills and multiplying  them on per unit cost. This per unit cost has gone up in the last year.  That is why the water bills has also gone up too. This manual reading recorded by a person who needs to read thousands of meters a day, may have human errors once in a while and can report some wrong readings like reversing the numbers etc... However, fortunately, they usually will even them out in their next readings. Our water bills showed very inconsistent readings and can be as little as a few units to several hundreds of units in the following months. Since then, we have been tracking our water meter usage on a daily basis to see how much water we consumed and where our usage was the highest.  The highest usage was the sprinkler system ! Each time the sprinkler system was on the digits really move.  We have re-designed our irrigation system to all drip system except for the lawns that is still on sprinklers and have also reduced the time and frequency. This has helped us cut our water bills by more than 60% ! Now by shutting them off completely during the rainy weeks, our usage may be just a few units per month! A saving of hundreds of dollars a month !