How much water does a residential irrigation system use?

Homeowners that wish to keep their grass green and their flowers blooming might want to invest in a residential irrigation system.

Just a few decades ago, American homeowners simply watered their lawns using a traditional water hose. In the 1950s, many home owners began using sprinkler system in order to keep their lawns looking fresh.

Just a few decades later, residential irrigation systems began hitting the market, giving consumers the ability to keep a professional looking lawn with minimum effort.

Before you begin looking at a residential irrigation system for you home, you’re probably wondering how much water an irrigation system for your house actually uses.

The simple answer? It depends! For example, if you lived in a dry climate, you would certainly use more water than someone who lives in a damp climate.

Many consumer websites suggest that a normal residential irrigation system can use up to 12 gallons of water per minute. If you have programmed your home watering system to run multiple times per day, your water bill could grow to become quite large at the end of the month.

Many residential irrigation systems allow you to setup your system on a water hose timer, giving you the ability to use just the right amount of water. For example, if you only wanted to water your lawn at night, you could install the water hose timer to only open to valve at a specific time each night while closing the valve after you’ve released enough water onto your lawn.

Since these systems can shoot out up to 12 gallons of water a minute, using a timer for your water can be a smart decision for your home. On one hand, it helps you conserve water and protect the environment. On the other hand, you can run your residential irrigation system for 10-15 minutes, then calculate the cost of your irrigation system in terms of how much your water utility company bills your per gallon of water.

For example, if your water company charges half a cent per gallon, and your system uses 12 gallons per minute, you can accurately calculate that your irrigation system will cost you 6 cents per minute for every minute that it is on.

That probably doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but if you have programmed your irrigation system to run for an hour, the calculation would look like this:

Six cents per minute multiplied by 60 minutes in an hour multiplied by 30 days in a month. Using these metrics, the cost of your residential irrigation system would run you about $108 extra per month on your water bill.

Using those same metrics, if your residential irrigation system only ran 30 minutes per day for 30 day straight, the bill comes in at a much more affordable $56 extra per month.

If you are someone who is wanting to purchase a residential irrigation system, the best thing you can do is to constantly toggle settings and adjust your sprinklers so so that the maximum amount of water is hitting the spots in your lawn that need the water the most.

If your sprinkler system is shooting water onto the road or on a driveway, you’re literally costing yourself money by attempting to water asphalt.

Continuously make small adjustment and tweak your residential irrigation system so that you can optimize the amount of water used by the system. Not only is this good for the environment, but it’s also good for your pocketbook as well.