How Much And How Often You Should Water Your Lawn | Smart Irrigation Tips

what's up guys rhett here welcome to lawn insider in today's video we're going to talk about how much you need to water how often you need to water and then i'm going to show you guys a test that's going to allow you to make sure that you're putting down the right amount of water in your lawn all right so most lawns are going to need about an inch of water a week but we don't just naturally know what an inch of water looks like in our lawn especially coming out of the sprinklers so that is where it comes in handy to have something that looks like this and this is just a measuring cup with a stake that allows you to drive it into the lawn and just measure how much water your irrigation system is putting out i actually got this off of amazon came in pack at 10. i will put the link below if you are interested in something like this you can see that the top there if it fills all the way to the top if it's focused anyway if it fills all the way to the top it's going to be an inch and a half of water and it gives you the half inch and inch mark as well so it just allows us to be a lot more precise and efficient with our water use and hopefully save a little bit on the water bill when it comes to watering frequency i actually only water one time a week now that is a little bit out of necessity because the city does put drought restrictions on us over the summer but we have double digit days over 100 degrees last year we probably had almost two months straight where we didn't get one inch total of precipitation and the lawn did fine on that one day a week watering schedule it might seem counterintuitive that less frequent watering is actually better for your grass but when you are watering heavy one day a week as opposed to light several days a week it's really forcing those roots to work deep into the ground to get to the moisture as opposed to when you are watering more frequently but not watering as much the water just kind of sits at the top of the soil and your roots aren't going to work down as far and you're just not going to have as strong of a root system so a good rule of thumb is that you don't want to be watering more than one or two days a week and i'll be the first one to admit that i am a huge lawn nerd so i spent the few extra dollars to get the 10 cups that i could kind of scatter throughout the lawn to get really precise with my water measurements but you can do this same test with a few empty tuna cans because the tuna can is about an inch high and basically we're just going to put them around the lawn and see how long it takes our irrigation system and all the different stations throughout the yard to fill that tuna can up to the top all right so all these tests i'm going to do in this video i'm going to do with those yellow measuring cups i showed you earlier in the video but just know that the tuna cans are interchangeable so anything i do with those measuring cups you can do with the tuna cans i'm gonna run the test today in my front lawn which is actually zone two on my sprinkler system but just know that you need to run this test on each station so i actually have six stations so i would be running this test six separate times in different spots in the lawn okay so the basic idea here is we're going to take these 10 measuring cups and we are going to try to stake them evenly throughout the front lawn or as evenly as we can and then we're going to run station two my front lawn is station two for 15 minutes and we're going to see what level the water gets to on the measuring cup all right so let's stake them and get this party started what are you waiting for huh [Music] so you can see that i went through and i spread them out evenly throughout the yard and now i am going to go to the irrigation system on my garage wall and set this station for 15 minutes i actually did a video on the x-core a few weeks ago but we're just going to go straight to the manual one station test now so you're going to click it here okay and i want to switch it to station 2 so click and right there and i'm going to set it for 15 minutes right now it's automatically set to 20 for me so i'm going to go down to 15. all right i've got the setup that i want now i'm just going to click run 15 minutes later all right so the sprinklers just ran for 15 minutes and now we're just gonna walk around to all the different cups in the yard and we're going to see where the water levels are [Music] at [Music] so i want to go ahead and show you guys what one of these looks like after it's been partially filled up with water i'm going to hold it as level as i can here okay so you can see that after 15 minutes we were just under half an inch of water so it might take honestly maybe 16 minutes to get to a half inch of water so that's telling us that in 32 minutes in this station that we're going to get down an inch of water in this part of the lawn instead of going for a full 32 minutes at once my advice would be to spread that out over two different start times in your program and what that's going to do is prevent runoff so it's possible for your lawn to get saturated if it's getting watered enough in one spot for a long enough time to where the water stops soaking into the ground and it'll just run off into the sidewalk or the driveway or the road or your neighbor's yard and in order to be more precise and just more efficient and get the biggest bang for your buck it's smarter to spread that out over two different start times that way you're making sure that you're getting as little runoff as possible okay so since i've done the front yard i've now got five more stations i need to go ahead and figure out but it's just going to be the same exact test at each station you're going to set them up in different spots throughout the station you're going to run the sprinkler system for 15 minutes and then you're just going to do a little quick math to see how long you're going to need to run that particular station to put down an inch of water i'm not going to bore you guys and put those other tests on video so i will see you in a second and we are back all right guys i think i'm going to go ahead and wrap it up right there i hope you guys found some useful information in that video if you did enjoy it make sure you hit that subscribe button and the like button and maybe throw a comment my way i appreciate you guys i'll see you again next week lawn insider out you

Channel: Lawn Insider

Views: 12,090

Keywords: How much you should water your lawn, How often you should water your lawn, How often should I water the lawn, How much should I water the lawn, Smart irrigation tips, Lawn watering frequency, brown lawn, dark green lawn, darker lawn, fertilizer, grass, heat, heat stress, humic acid, hydretain, irrigation, lawn, lawn care, spring, stressed out, summer, water, water lawn, watering, yard, lawn care tips, lawn irrigation, how to water the lawn, lawn watering tips

Id: n9NOt0eswk0

Length: 7min 46sec (466 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 14 2021