The Weather Web can save you up to 50% on water bills
The Darwin region currently uses more water than can be captured and supplied in the long term, and climate variability means we are never sure how much rain we will get from year to year. So learning to be more water efficient is important to ensure our water supply is sustainable.
Over half of all water used in the Darwin region goes on gardens. In Darwin households, garden watering makes up around 57% of average water use. After conducting 650 water efficiency consultations, Living Water Smart found that the majority of people overwater their garden. So it makes sense for us to try and curb our garden water use, without impacting our garden and lifestyle. Gardens can be just as healthy, sometimes healthier, with reduced watering.
Darwin’s Weather Web will help you make informed decisions about how much to water your garden so it is not being overwatered, whether you water your garden manually, use standard irrigation controller or ideally a smart irrigation controller. Paying attention to weather is especially useful during the wet season and the periods either side of the wet season when rainfall can be sporadic. You can save up to 50% on water bills by making irrigation adjustments based on your localised weather data.
Many of us don’t know how, or have the time to adjust our irrigation according to what is happening with the weather. We might turn the irrigation on in the dry season and off in the wet, but that is often the extent of it. Yet our gardens need different amounts of water throughout the year according to many variables. Rainfall, temperature, humidity and wind strength all affect how much water our garden needs and how well our irrigation system performs.
If you water your garden manually, pay attention to the rainfall in your suburb to help you decide when to water.
If you have a standard irrigation controller you can manually adjust your irrigation (turning it on or off) based on the amount of rain your suburb has received.
If you have, or get, a smart irrigation controller it will automatically adjust your irrigation based on the weather in your suburb and a pre-programmed set of weather triggers that tell the irrigation system to turn up and down or even on or off. A smart irrigation controller and the Weather Web is ultimate irrigation marriage - they were made for each other! So if you’ve been tossing up whether to purchase a smart irrigation controller, do your homework and if it will work for your garden - wait no longer, you should get your money back within a year or two with the savings you’ll make on your water bills!