Your normal garden sprinklers are like a band of soldiers fresh out of basic training: they’re good at taking orders and shooting where you tell them to, but they tend to waste a lot of ammo. We’re talking millions of gallons per year globally, just because they have bad aim.
Running with this soldier analogy, Droplet –the latest entry into the growing category of smart sprinklers— would be more like a Navy Seal sniper. Droplet works by selectively watering plants in your garden with precise streams of water, rather than spraying wildly and praying for a hit.
Once connected to your home Wi-Fi network, these compact little water cannons can not only be programmed to fire exactly where you target them to, but also be configured to follow an exhaustively detailed schedule of when they should and shouldn’t make it rain.
And they’re smart too — since the system is connected to the web, it can draw real-time info from thousands of different weather stations, so it knows not to water if there’s strong odds it’s going to rain soon. The accompanying control application even allows you to specify what kind of plants and soil you’re watering, and will adjust it’s own schedule to accommodate your garden’s special needs.
Droplet’s creators claim that this watering process can dramatically cut your water consumption (up to 90 percent in some cases) and thereby save you a bundle on your water bill. The company says Droplet will save users an average of $263 annually, which is a good thing, since it’ll retail for around $300 when it goes on sale later this year. If that estimate proves to be accurate, smart sprinklers may very well be a worthwhile investment.
Droplet is set to be released on March 24, and is currently available for preorder on Amazon. Find out more here.
