Turf Tips: Tap timers
Tap timers are the perfect solution for busy periods when you don’t have time to water your lawn. Times like now in the holidays, we don’t always have time to stand around and hose by hand or sit and watch our sprinkler go round, so we need something to water our lawn for us.
The first step is to know how much water your lawn needs, we have a great article about this including a great ‘life hack’ for measuring how much water your lawn is getting in our: How much to water your lawn article.
Getting the water down
The next step before we install tap timers is figuring out how elaborate your watering system will be. On the simple scale of things, we always recommend a soaker hoses as they deliver the water from close to the ground allowing more water to go exactly where you want it, and avoid watering your concrete. But any sprinkler is better than no sprinkler and will allow you to setup a timer.
At the elaborate end of the spectrum is a pop-up sprinkler system. With heads that sit below your mower blades this is perfect for the absolutely hands-off approach to watering your lawn.
To see how easy it could be to install pop-up sprinklers you can head on over to the Bunnings website where they have a How to install Pop-up Sprinklers D.I.Y. article.
Timer options
Just like the watering options the tap timer options range from simple to elaborate. For your soaker hose or sprinkler you could use a simple Mechanical Tap Timer
or a Digital Tap Timer. For your pop-up sprinkler system you could also use these simple timers, or you could use a more elaborate system like the Multi Zone Tap Timer
or the fully automated setup of an Irrigation Controller
with Soleniod Control Valves. Bunnings has great D.I.Y. articles How to automate a garden irrigation system
and the How to install irrigations solenoids.
