Expert's Rating
Pros
- “Water printing” technology keeps water from going where it isn’t needed
- New controller inspires much more confidence
- Can simplify your irrigation design, requiring fewer sprinkler heads
Cons
- Watering doesn’t always hit the same mark from day to day
- Very weak event logging
- If you have an existing sprinkler system, you won’t be able to re-use those pipes
Our Verdict
I wouldn’t tear out my existing irrigation system to install Irrigreen, but it’s still worth a look for new homes where water is expensive or its use is restricted (which could be everywhere in the near future).
Price When Reviewed
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Best Prices Today: Irrigreen Digital Sprinkler System
We took our inaugural look at the Irrigreen lawn irrigation system nearly two years ago. It’s an in-ground watering system with a unique approach to the way your sprinklers work. The manufacturer has made a handful of updates since then, including a wholesale redesign of its controller box, so we’ve re-evaluated the entire system.
Before we get to the hands-on, let’s do a refresh on how and why Irrigreen is different from a traditional irrigation system. The product revolves around a smart pop-up sprinkler head that doesn’t spray water in a big circle; rather, it rotates like the hand of a clock as it “prints” water on the lawn, a few degrees at a time.
This sprinkler head is based on the same design principle as an inkjet printer, which is no coincidence: Irrigreen co-founder and CTO Gary Kleinfelter helped pioneer the concept of inkjet printers and holds 35 patents on the technology. You set the maximum distance you want the spray to reach each step of the way.
Mapping your yard is intuitive and straightforward and—dare I say—kind of fun.
Irrigreen’s pop-up sprinkler head has 14 nozzles of varying sizes. The head can “throw” streams of water varying distances and adjust the degree of water pressure in real time, so that the spray pattern follows the precise contours of your lawn. (It’s shown here on a temporary stand for testing purposes.)
Christopher Null/Foundry
When the nozzle is facing north, you might spray to the maximum distance of about 30 feet (depending on your water pressure), but when you spray to the east, you might just want 15 feet of coverage because that’s where the wall of your house is. You can fine-tune your coverage zone as much as you’d like, the idea being that you can create a watering “map” that only hits your grass and plants and wastes no water on your paths and driveway.
The linear spray also means that watering doesn’t overlap in the way traditional sprinklers do. A full rotation of the sprinkler head equates to 0.05 inches of water sprayed onto the lawn over the course of about 8 minutes, with multiple rotations adding to the soak level. The YouTube video below will make the concept a whole lot easier to understand.
This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart sprinkler controllers.
None of the above has changed since our last review, and neither has the fact that installing an Irrigreen system requires trenching to install new water pipes in the ground. If you have an existing drip system for your flower beds, you can control it as well with traditional valve zones. Irrigreen says most yards can get by with much less hardware than a traditional watering solution: Since its sprinkler heads are located centrally in the yard instead of at the edges of the lawn, you should be able to get by with fewer of them, and with less pipe required to connect them to your water source.
How we tested the Irrigreen system
Since a standard installation means digging up the yard, testing Irrigreen as a reviewer remains complicated, which is why Irrigreen provides a stopgap solution: Its digital sprinkler head can attach to a stand and a garden hose, allowing it to be placed on the lawn instead of buried underneath it. The Irrigreen Controller attaches normally to the sprinkler head via its control wire, giving testers the ability to put the solution through its paces without having to turn any earth.
Again, things haven’t changed much on this front, even down to the fact that Irrigreen’s setup instructions are still largely nonexistent. A QR code directs you to Irrigreen’s website, where users can walk through the process in image form. Tip to Irrigreen: Building these instructions directly into the mobile app would be far more convenient for users than referring them to the website. Better printed instructions wouldn’t hurt, either.
This new controller is a big improvement over Irrigreen’s first effort, which looked like a proof-of-concept prototype.
Christopher Null/Foundry
It’s during this setup process that I encountered what is arguably the biggest upgrade to the Irrigreen system: A brand-new control box that serves as the brains of the irrigation operation. The former Irrigreen controller was an industrial device built into a generic plastic case that lacked any sort of personality. The new Irrigreen Smart Controller 3 is comparatively a thing of beauty, featuring an engineered case and a streamlined interior, complete with a dot-matrix readout.
Unlike the IG2, terminal posts are now hidden under a panel, keeping the interior of the box clean and uncluttered, and since controller cables can be daisy-chained to up to 16 sprinkler heads, you won’t need those anyway. In fact, you won’t likely need to deal with the box at all after initial setup, but if you do—since basic operations can be performed directly on the box, without the app—it’s much easier than before.
Much like my experience with the IG2, I muddled my way through a not-at-all-complex setup and had things running in short order (albeit as a temporary setup just for this review).
Irrigreen’s new app
Irrigreen’s app has evolved over the last two years, but the concept remains the same. After onboarding to your Wi-Fi network (both 2.4- and 5GHz networks are supported now), you get to work configuring your zones. For each of your irrigation zones, you walk through a configuration that spins the sprinkler head through 360 degrees, while you set points on the app along the way that direct how far you’d like the water to be thrown in that direction, one step at a time.
Irrigating your lawn with a sprinkler that sprays water on the grass like an injket printer sprays ink on paper is an ingenious concept.
Christopher Null/Foundry
This is done live, with water being sprayed while you fine-tune the distance. If water’s hitting the fence, you pull the dot corresponding to that direction back a few pixels, watching the water spray adjust in real time. Once you get things just right, it’s on to the next point. Irrigreen suggests working in 5-foot increments until you’ve gone full circle and covered the yard.
After configuration, it’s time to set schedules. A bevy of scheduling options are available—certain days of the week, or only on even/odd days, for example—or you can let Irrigreen’s upgraded Auto Water system take over. Auto Water is a lot like Rachio’s Weather Intelligence, in that it takes local weather conditions and specific yard details into account to adjust the time between watering runs.
Auto Water is either on for all schedules or off for all of them; you can’t manually water the lawn every Sunday night and let Auto Water do the rest. It’s difficult to tell how effective Auto Water will be without months of testing, but it does seem more capable than the more primitive version that shipped with the IG2, and it skipped runs in quick succession because it presumably knew the grass would already be wet.
Irrigreen’s app lets you program watering schedules, taking current weather conditions into consideration,
Christopher Null/Foundry
Disappointingly, there’s no longer a good logging system to determine how much water is being used or whether watering runs have been skipped. The app tracks a week’s worth of usage (by day) while indicating when the last run happened; otherwise, there’s no way to drill down into watering cycles over a longer period of time.
Another new feature is support for voice commands via Alexa: Users can now issue simple commands telling Irrigreen to start or stop watering certain zones at certain times. A handy “Quick Run” feature will also deliver 0.15 inches of water to a given zone on demand, if things are looking dry, although these runs oddly aren’t counted toward that day’s water usage total in the weekly logs.
Irrigreen works well, though I did see some fluctuations in throw distance from day to day. When first calibrated, I had water tuned to hit just inches from a pathway, but on day two, the system was overspraying that point and watering a foot of the pavement. Irrigreen clearly requires some vigilance and fine-tuning to prevent such mishaps, which are presumably caused by shifts in water pressure. The more-expensive Irrigreen XP sprinkler heads, which cost an additional $90 each, are said to take that factor into account.
The good news is that the price of Irrigreen hasn’t meaningfully changed: I priced out the same setup as last time around, with five standard sprinkler heads and a controller coming in at $3,330, compared to $3,280 for the IG2. That’s close enough to even for me, although it’s still pricey a system that will also require wholesale re-plumbing of your irrigation pipes to install. If you’re laying down irrigation on a new yard from scratch, the calculus will make a lot more sense.
Should you buy an Irrigreen smart sprinkler system?
The bottom line here really remains the same as my initial analysis: The upgrades to the controller box, new Alexa skills, and theoretically improved Auto Water system are welcome, particularly since they don’t come with a higher price tag attached. In today’s era of landscape water rationing (at least where I live), every drop of water we can save is important.
Again, I can’t speak to the long-term viability of Irrigreen or its hardware (such as how well it will weather freezes), or whether it really will save the tens of thousands of gallons of water per month that it promises. But in a limited testing situation like this, it still shows plenty of promise (especially for new irrigation installations).
Correction, November 8, 2024: We had previously reported that you’d need a separate controller for a drip system. Irrigreen’s controller supports traditional valve zones for this purpose.
Best Prices Today: Irrigreen Digital Sprinkler System
Author: Christopher Null, Contributor, TechHive
Christopher Null is an award-winning technology journalist with more than 25 years of experience writing about and reviewing consumer and business tech products. Previously, he served as Executive Editor for PC Computing magazine and was the founder and Editor in Chief of Mobile magazine, the first print publication focused exclusively on mobile tech. In addition to covering a wide range of smart home gear for TechHive, he is a frequent contributor to Wired, This Old House, and AAA’s Via Magazine.