April 17, 2009

So how green does your lawn need to be? Your lawn can be very green while adopting some good best practices about when and how often you run the sprinklers.  In a former phase of my own awareness, I used to water my lawn every single day…that’s what I thought you were supposed to do.  The little time clocks kicked in every morning about 6am and what a wonderful feeling to wake up in the summer to the sound of sprinklers in the morning.  Now when I hear the sprinklers, I somehow hear the sound of a cash register owned by East Bay Mud.

So I went to every 2 days on the schedule, started in the early morning hours to control evaporation and you know what?  My lawn is just as green and my calculated savings for external irrigation was about 29%.  It’s true, I was over watering and this one act of water conservation lowered my water bill instantly.  Combined with rainwater harvesting (and other plans), I expect my usage (and dollars spent) to even be lower this year in spite of rate hikes.

On April 24th, the city of Paso Robles enacts its own water rationing mandates, including a rule limiting lawn watering to three days a week. You can read the short article about that here.