Garden Tech: An App to Water Your Lawn via Gardenista
What can’t a smartphone do these days? It can buy you lattes, find out the baseball score, and measure how many steps you take in a day. It can check the weather forecast, and turn on your irrigation system. And if you’re using Hydros, a new smartphone app by Simple Elements, it can check the weather forecast and the moisture level in your soil before turning on your irrigation system. We like the idea behind it: saving water, saving money, and helping the planet while keeping the garden in good shape.
The founders of Simple Elements, Christy and Manuel Masri, invented Hydros after becoming frustrated with their old timer for irrigating the lawn. “We could set the days and how long to water,” said Christy. “But if we were out of town and didn’t know it was going to rain, there was no changing it. It would turn on the sprinklers in the morning, even though it might be raining in the afternoon. After that happened several times, we thought, ‘why not create a controller ourselves?'”
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