FREMONT, Calif. – Summer 2011 is here, and Garden Apps, creators of landscaping and irrigation focused mobile applications and Web services, has unveiled the Sprinkler Times app, helping people across the United States find the correct number of minutes to set their sprinkler timers for maintain healthy gardens all year round.
Available for iPhones, iPads, Android smartphones and tablets, as well as on the Web, Sprinkler Times is the first mobile app built using Garden Apps’ 3Green approach to personal technology: save plants (green in the yard), save the environment (green in philosophy), and save money (green in the bank).
Sprinkler Times easily and instantly calculates the correct settings for automated sprinkler systems so that landscapes get the optimal amount of water for specific regions and plant types all year long. It uses regionally-based, historical climate information together with industry-regulated soil and plant data to determine the best possible settings required for automated sprinkler systems. Garden Apps has been using this data successfully for decades to eliminate overwatering, leading to healthier landscapes and household savings of hundreds of dollars annually. Now the company delivers Sprinkler Times for year-round water optimization:
Summer time: Sprinkler Times ensures that people aren’t underwatering their yards during the two hottest months of year, July and August.
Spring and fall: These two seasons account for most of the water wasted in landscaping and gardening. Often misled by healthy looking plants, people are unaware they are overwatering their plants by hundreds of gallons a year. Proper settings ensure healthy plants and potential savings of hundreds of dollars.
Winter: One of the trickiest seasons for watering plants in some regions, the Sprinkler Times apps uses historical data to determine whether watering plants, even a couple minutes per week, makes sense.
“Most people will use a single time setting on their sprinkler systems all year round,” said Tom Del Conte, founder and president of Garden Apps, and a 39 year landscaping and irrigation veteran. “If the settings were made in the spring or fall, people could be underwatering their plants in hot summer months. More typically, sprinkler settings made in summer will cause substantial overwatering the rest of the year. It turns out that optimum sprinkler settings are far more complicated than people perceive for the easy task of watering the yard.”
All a person needs to know to use the Sprinkler Times app is the zip code of the landscaping, type of plants being watered, type of sprinklers used to water, type of soil and whether the plants are in the sun or shade. Sprinkler Times and its data bank and irrigation algorithms do the rest.
Sprinkler Times is available for free in the iTunes AppStore and Android Market. To unlock all features, people can upgrade Sprinkler Times via an in-app purchase of $5.99. The online version of Sprinkler Times costs $5.99 and is available at www.sprinklertimes.com.