More than for flushing, washing, cooking or even drinking, Utahns use drinking water to water their landscapes. Home, public and commercial landscapes have great potential for water conservation, and that doesn’t have to mean ripping out your favorite flowers and grass and replacing them with gravel and cacti.
There are many beautiful combinations of plants that thrive on less water, but even common landscape plants like turfgrass and annual flowers, can live with less water than most sprinkling systems provide. The problem is that most people don’t know how much water their sprinklers are spraying. Many cities participate in the Water Check program that sends interns to do irrigation assessments, measuring how much water is being applied to landscapes, and providing people recommended schedules for how long and how often their sprinklers should run each week from spring through fall.
Adjusting sprinklers and their schedules is a small thing that can provide big results. In Salt Lake City, for example, people in the Water Check program saved an average of 64 thousand gallons of water and more than $700 on their water bills per household last year.
Water Source Facts are part of UPR’s partnership with Utah State University’s 2015 Year of Water and USU Extension.
