How long should you run your irrigation for?

Do you know how long to run your irrigation for and how many days a week to water? 

As a general guide, in the dry season Living Water Smart recommends the below 3, 2, 1 guide for efficient watering:

• Three days a week for lawn.
• Two days a week for exotics such as fruit trees and palms.
• One day a week or less for native plants and trees such as acacias, grevilleas and eucalypts.

Give your plants and lawn 10 mm of water each time you irrigate and generally about 30 mm of water over a week.

There are many different types of sprinklers, including fixed spray, single-stream rotors or multi-stream rotors, and drippers.  Each type of sprinkler applies water at different rates, making it hard for you to work out how long to water your lawn and plants to reach the recommended 10 mm of water.

A catch can test can help; you can use it to determine how long to run your irrigation system or sprinkler for and how even water is distributed over your lawn or garden. 

You could use a specially made sprinkler catch can, which are available from local irrigation and hardware stores or online, or tuna or cat food cans work well too. 

Catch Can Test

Follow the steps below to determine the run time of your irrigation system:

Step 1:  Place a few catch cans evenly across the irrigated area (in a grid like pattern) and run your irrigation for 10 minutes.

Step 2:  Record the amount of water captured in each of your catch cans (tip: if using a tuna can, use a ruler placed into the centre of the can and record in millimetres).  Add all the amounts together and then divide by the number of catch cans you are using to get an average amount of water per catch can.  Write this figure down.  

To find out how many minutes to run your irrigation, you just need to divide 100 by the figure you have written down (the average amount of water per catch can).  To help you, just put your written down figure, the average, in the calculator below: