Portable Device Keeps Track of Water Use

Would you like to know exactly how much water you use in the garden, without making that trek to the curb to decipher the city’s meter?

How much does it takes to drench those plants in containers, to soak a certain garden bed, or, after a hard day’s work in the garden, how much water does it take to wash all that honestly earned dirt off in the shower?

Now you can tell to the tenth of a gallon, thanks to some ingenious folks up in Silicon Valley who have come up with a portable “personal water meter.”

Called the WaterTracker, it is a small plastic device with a bold liquid crystal display. It snaps onto special adapters that attach to spigots or spouts with standard threads.

The adapters can stay put, but you move the meter from one to another, simply snapping it on and off. You can begin the day measuring water use in the garden and finish by measuring your shower, with just the one meter.

There are three kinds of adapters--a chrome one with threads for a shower nozzle, another for the sink (it replaces the threaded aerator or screen on the end of the spout), and a brass adapter that attaches to garden spigots with standard hose threads (it will also work on washing machine spigots).

Inside each fitting is a little spinning wheel and the meter somehow counts the revolutions of the wheel. This reads outs as gallons and tenths of a gallon. You can reset it whenever you want and it also keeps a resettable cumulative count so you can total up the entire day’s use.

I’ve been playing with a WaterTracker for a couple of weeks now. Before I tried it in the garden, I put it in the shower to settle a long-standing dispute between my two teen-age sons that started during mandatory water rationing.

One takes very short showers, the other takes much longer showers but he keeps the water at a bare trickle. Both claim they use less than the other.

The youngest won the dispute, using only 5.6 gallons of water to take a shower, but the oldest wasn’t far off. He used just 6.8.

In a rematch the next morning, the older got a 3.1, or so he says. He reset it before I could check, but this little device is the best way yet I’ve found for shortening showers, thus saving more for the garden.

I should add that both boys, maligned in one of my earlier columns, put their sister and parents to shame. Dad used 15 gallons on his first try, 7.1 on the next, by turning the water off and on.

Daughter with her waist-length hair and 25 different conditioners didn’t do so well and her mother avoided the entire issue by taking baths. You can’t attach the WaterTracker to a tub faucet (though I guess I could fill the tub through the shower nozzle to see just what it holds).

But, what I really wanted to know was how much water I was using outdoors, so I put the brass attachment on the garden spigot we most often use. Except for our tiny little lawn, everything in our garden is watered with small, movable sprinklers but I had no idea how much water they used.

I quickly found out that to water a 10-foot diameter circle of ground for 20 minutes took 50 gallons of water, more than I supposed. Though that sounds like a lot, I water the irrigated parts of the garden only every 1-2 weeks so that really wasn’t too bad. Of course, there are quite a few 50-gallon sessions required to water the entire irrigated section of the garden.

(Some parts of the garden (perhaps half of it) are quite drought resistant and are watered only two or three times during the entire year.)

Using a soil probe, I have found that 20 minutes of watering with one of these little portable sprinklers soaks the ground to a depth of 18 inches in my soil, plenty deep enough.

How about container plants? Growing plants in pots has been billed as one way of saving water, even though the container plants in my garden need water every other day in summer.

Turns out it took only 9.2 gallons to water all 17 pots, most of which are quite large.

I discovered that it takes between 9.9 and 12 gallons of water to refill my lily pond every few days. This was a surprise because the pond is quite big, measuring 4 by 14 feet, and I was sure it probably took 15 to 20 gallons to top it off.

It took 2.2 gallons of water to wet down the compost pile and 1 gallon to fill a 1-gallon watering can (I was just checking--the manufacturer says it’s accurate to plus or minus 3%).

We usually use a broom and dust pan because I know we’re not supposed to be hosing down patios and walks, but for purely scientific reasons, I washed down my 20- by 30-foot patio. It was slow going because the patio is covered with furniture and potted plants, and it took 22.2 gallons of water. But it’s the cleanest it has looked in at least five years.

That was more water than I expected, but I still think it a better way of cleaning up than those noisy blowers--I’d rather save the water somewhere else. At least the dust was settled into the bushes and not relocated into the house, or on top of the car.

I don’t know if anyone still washes their own car in this town, but I can tell you it takes about 8 gallons to do a big Pontiac Bonneville. I used a trigger-type nozzle to wash the car and hose down the patio so the water wasn’t running all the time.

There are things to be learned about water use in the garden (and house) that the WaterTracker can tell you. It’s not a cheap little gadget; it costs about $65 for a meter and one adapter of your choice (additional adapters cost $20.) By early spring they will be available at Armstrong Nurseries and other retail outlets, but for the moment they are only available directly from the manufacturer, Muir Products, by calling (800) 354-5161.

Gardener’s Checklist

For dedicated gardeners, here are suggestions from the California Assn. of Nurserymen on what to do in the garden this week:

Disbud your camellias, leaving only one bloom bud per branch to get the largest blossoms. Leave some further down the stem for later bloom.

Deeply irrigate and feed established shrubs and trees this month.

September is the month to renovate diseased or weedy lawns. Check with your local California Certified Nurseryperson for advice.

If you have not switched to an 0-10-10 fertilizer for your azaleas, camellias and rhododendrons, do so now. Nitrogen-based fertilizers will cause the plants to drop their buds.

Pull out summer vegetable plants and annuals that are spent and add them to your compost pile.