This smart sprinkler taps AI to use half as much water on your lawn

As the weather gets hotter, Americans water their lawns more often and waste more water.

Traditional sprinklers aren’t accurate, usually watering the driveway, the sidewalk and the lawn. Landscape irrigation uses about 9 billion gallons of water per day, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and about half of that goes to waste.

Meanwhile, water prices are surging as climate change accelerates both water scarcity and drought. That’s why it’s time for a smarter sprinkler. New technologies from companies like Rain Bird, Rachio and Minnesota-based Irrigreen aim to make irrigation more accurate. Irrigreen likens its system to the precision of an inkjet printer.

“It’s a digital, robotic sprinkler that pops up in the middle of the lawn and it basically traces the contours of your landscaping, and it’s putting down a completely even layer of water,” said Shane Dyer, CEO of Irrigreen.

Dyer says the sprinkler’s single-head system saves about half the water typically used — with the use of artificial intelligence.                                                                                                 

“We use the cloud data and information we have about your soil and what kind of crop you’re growing like what type of grass, like cool weather grass or warm weather grass, how much shade and sun you have, so that we can design patterns that follow the weather, so that every single zone in your house gets an individualized watering pattern,” Dyer explained.

The system incorporates weather reports so it’s not watering when it’s raining. All of this is controlled by an app, like a video game, moving the sprinkler head to water around corners and in patterns. The company has installed a few thousand systems across the country and is expanding quickly, which is a big draw for investors, like Ulu Ventures.

“It was an extraordinary market opportunity. There are 80 million lawns in the United States, and this is an innovative technology that not only saves money but dramatically reduces the amount of water [a] consumer uses,” said Steve Reale, chief financial officer at Ulu Ventures.

The system costs between $2,000 and $5,000, depending on how large your property is and how many sprinkler heads you need. That is comparable with other in-ground systems.

Irrigreen said it’s already saved about 200 million gallons of water in the systems installed so far. It also has a tool on its website where consumers can type in their address and see how much water they’re wasting. The company does that using satellite imagery.

In addition to Ulu Ventures, Irrigreen is backed by Sage Hill Investors, Burnt Island Ventures, MFV Partners and Sum Ventures. It has raised $15 million.

— CNBC climate producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this report.