Hey, look, I can still blog about technology!
So as lots of you probably already know, if you are trying to water a yard and a bunch of plants with “normal” water pressure, there can be a lot of hose moving involved. In hot weather this becomes very annoying, and I typically have to set lots of phone alarms to remember to go move the water around every 30 or 45 minutes. Just cutting down my sprinkler moving by 50% would make a huge difference. The problem is, modern house water pressure is typically not good, and most common sprinklers don’t provide a lot of spray power and have lots of limitations.
For watering “large” areas, the two best options I knew of before, until now, were either something like this:
which is hard to adjust and mostly covers a narrow rectangle, and then (for more range) an impact sprinkler like this:
These are, in my experience, very prone to getting stuck or not going around correctly. If the impact sprinkler gets stuck while running, you will very quickly dump a lot of water in one specific direction and this can happen seemingly at any time.
Hoping for slightly better technology, I recently discovered BigSprinkler.com, and now have two new great additions to my sprinkler collection!
YEESSSSSS! This is basically the Binford 9000 of home sprinkler options!
The “1000R” is basically a pipe attached to a pop-up Rainbird Falcon “gear” sprinkler head that you might put into maybe like a golf course landscape sprinkler (?). It’s not perfect, but has substantially more range and infinitely less hassle than the impact sprinkler. I’m using the smaller “4” size nozzle and getting about 50% more distance (wow) than the impact sprinkler. The end of the water stream is kind of a bit of a fire-hose, but I think it’s ok and wouldn’t hurt most plants. If the head needs to be replaced you can screw it off and put on a new one with teflon tape, the same thing you would use on a shower head — so this should basically last forever.
How is watering coverage? There are essentially two nozzle openings in the sprinkler that don’t quite create the effect of a single stream, but it’s pretty good. In the normal purchased configuration there is nothing to aim, but I bought the “part circle” head model, which I should have probably should not have. It is not something that is easy to adjust by just setting a left and right stop point (screwdriver is required), so I have it adjusted to 360 (or more? degrees) and left it there. If you want something to do a 180 degree arc I could see setting it at 180 and leaving it maybe, but it’s not fun trying to readjust it.
Also one other possible snag, the base is quite heavy and substantial to where some older folks may not like lifting it (20+ pounds), but it’s great for me.
For other (smaller) areas, since I was curious about it, I also got one of these Wobbler sprinklers, which are apparently very popular in commercial irrigation:
The wobbler sprays in a fairly large circle, but definitely not as far as the gear drive can go. The sprinkler head is fairly lightweight plastic and throws water droplets kind of up into the air in a dome/mushroom shape. My goal here was to be able to spray some grass and things that were around under the base of some trees, where the rectangular yard sprinkler was not able to hit things. It may have to be moved a bit more but it’s better than trying to adjust the rectangular “normal” yard sprinkler. You can also daisy-chain them together, though I haven’t tried that.
So there you go, two new sprinkler options you probably didn’t know about!
If you want small sprinkler options for flower beds, I particularly like this Dramm one:
And while I haven’t tried it, I see Dramm also has a (relatively inexpensive compared to the Big Sprinkler 1000R) gear drive option for sale (that likely has a lot less range), that I would be interested in trying for beds where I do not need to set a 360 degree circle and don’t need a lot of range:
This might also be a good option.
Knowing is half the battle - if interested, you too can level up your yard and plant watering game to join the future.