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"Water My Yard" Web Program Seeks to Tame Texas Overwatering08-12-13 | News

"Water My Yard" Web Program Seeks to Tame Texas Overwatering

Studies have shown homeowners typically apply twice the water needed to maintain lawns, wasting water and the energy needed to pump it even in a ???wet' year. A new web-based program in north Texas is showing homeowners under local water restrictions exactly how much water they need to keep lawns healthy.

A new project by the North Texas Municipal Water District could cut into the millions of gallons of water wasted on over-watered landscapes every summer.

The water district services about 1.6 million users in 60 cities and communities in north central Texas, and has been dealing with serious supply problems in recent years, according to district public relations coordinator Denise Hickey. First, the ongoing drought has reduced reservoir levels. Second, Lake Texoma, which had made up 28 percent of the district's water supply, has been offline since 2009 because of a zebra mussel infestation that has clogged pipelines.

These issues have led to the imposition of Stage 3 water restrictions, which means homeowners in the district are restricted to watering once a week. The district knows homeowners tend to overwater during the once-a-week watering, Hickey said, a practice that wastes water, raises peak water demand and actually harms lawns.

In response, the "WaterMyYard" program was established to determine the amount of water needed to maintain healthy grass. The program tracks evapotranspiration rates with weather stations, and calculates weekly irrigation needs for specific locales within the district, according to Dr. Guy Fipps, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service irrigation engineer.

The project feeds that data to a website, WaterMyYard.org, which provides recommendations for how long homeowners should run their irrigation systems. Users can also subscribe to get watering recommendations emailed to them on Mondays of each week, Fipps said.

Launching the program required adding more weather stations to the area, increasing the accuracy of the data across the district's urban areas and microclimates. The district decided the potential payback was worth the investment, sponsoring seven new weather stations and the WaterMyLawn website, Hickey said.

"It takes a variety of water efficiency and water conservation tools to gain water reductions," Hickey said. "We know outdoor irrigation directly affects peak-use demand in the summer months, and this is a tool to educate consumers on how much water the landscape actually requires to remain healthy."