Dreams of home ownership usually do not include figuring out landscape irrigation systems. That is probably a good thing, because the average irrigation system can bring otherwise competent and confident people to tears, or worse. Manuals seem only to add to the confusion. The usual solution is to hire someone to set up your system and to be on-call in case something goes wrong.
On Thursday, Jerusalem-based Tevatronic launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the manufacturing startup of Exilong, the company’s water-saving smart irrigation control system that promises to give you your life back.
“Today’s irrigation solutions are either scheduled solutions or decision supported solutions, we are the first autonomous solution,” Tevatronic CEO Oleg Korol said. “We don’t only allow users to forget about their garden, we encourage it — because we know that our data is going to help our technology water the plants better than any human assumption could.”
Related: Zilker is a smart irrigation system you hook up to your hose
The Exilong system consists of wireless soil sensors, watering controllers, and software. The battery operated soil sensors stick in the ground and detect root length, soil hydration, and water consumption. The sensors transmit the data from each sensor to a watering controller. The sensors are rated to run for up to three years with two AA batteries.
The watering controllers, which plug into house current, can control up to four irrigation system water valves, or zones. If you have more than four irrigation zones, multiple watering controllers can be chained to work together.
Whatever your configuration of soil sensors, watering controllers, and irrigation system zones, all the data for your complete system is sent to a cloud-based server. The server figures out the irrigation zone scheduling and controls the whole system.
You can let the Exilong system run on its own, which is what Tevatronic recommends. In the company’s testing with an earlier product for agricultural applications, it reports decreased water and fertilizer use by 30 percent and crop yield increases of more than 20 percent.
If you prefer more involvement, you can monitor what is happening on a website portal or via iOS or Android mobile device apps. You can observe the data for individual sensors or the whole system.
Another benefit of the Exilong system is system maintenance. If the controller detects a malfunction such as a leak or a stuck valve, it sends an alert to the owner.
According to Tevatronics, with Exilong you can “finally stop ruining your plants and inflating your water bills.”
