As the weather warms, Americans are watering their lawns more often and wasting more water.
Traditional sprinklers are not precise and typically water the driveway, sidewalk, and lawn. Landscape irrigation uses about 9 billion gallons of water per day, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and about half of that amount is wasted.
Meanwhile, water prices are rising as climate change accelerates both water scarcity and drought. That’s why it’s time for a smarter sprinkler. New technologies from companies like Rain Bird, Rachio and Minnesota-based Irrigreen aim to make irrigation more precise. Irrigreen compares its system to the precision of an inkjet printer.
“It’s a digital robotic sprinkler that pops up in the middle of the lawn and basically traces the contours of your landscaping, and it lays down a completely uniform layer of water,” said Shane Dyer, CEO of Irrigreen.
Dyer says the sprinkler’s single-head system saves about half the water typically used – thanks to artificial intelligence.
“We use the cloud data and the information that we have about your soil and the type of crop you’re growing, like the type of grass, like cool weather grass or warm weather grass, the amount of shade and sun you have, so we can design patterns that track the weather, so each area of your home gets an individualized watering pattern,” Dyer explained.
The system incorporates weather reports so it doesn’t water when it rains. All of this is controlled by an app, like a video game, that moves the sprinkler head to water around corners and in patterns. The company has installed a few thousand systems across the country and is growing rapidly, which is very attractive to investors, such as Ulu Ventures.
“It was an extraordinary market opportunity. There are 80 million lawns in the United States, and this is an innovative technology that not only saves money but dramatically reduces the amount of water (is) used by consumers,” said Steve Reale, chief financial officer. at Ulu Ventures.
The system costs between $2,000 and $5,000, depending on the size of your property and the number of sprinkler heads you need. This is comparable to other buried systems.
Irrigreen said it has already saved about 200 million gallons of water in the systems installed so far. It also has a tool on its website where consumers can enter their address and see how much water they are wasting. The company does this using satellite images.
In addition to Ulu Ventures, Irrigreen is backed by Sage Hill Investors, Burnt Island Ventures, MFV Partners and Sum Ventures. It raised $15 million.
— CNBC climate producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this report.
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