Last year was very dry and, despite my attempts to give the yard the right amount of water, it still died. This year has been pretty dry as well, but the yard is still green. The difference? I’m using the “Zimmerman Method” this year.
Our OpenSprinkler system has a setting that lets you enable a calculation for how much water to apply to the yard. If I had some rain sensors in the yard, those would be handy, but it turns out that you can get a pretty good idea of how much to water based on some variables from weather data. You can read the full explanation on the OpenSprinkler github page, but here’s the basic idea:
Zimmerman uses 3 pieces of data: Mean humidity ( defined as (min+max)/2 ), mean temp, and precipitation.
They are weighted in the following manner:
- 30 – mean humidity
- (mean temp – 70)*4
- Precipitation * 200
Those are all divided by 100 and added together, then 100 is added for a scale, which is then bound to 0 to 200.
That gives you a percentage and your normal schedule is adjusted by that percentage. So for example, today it is cloudy, cooler and kind of humid. The watering schedule is only 32% of normal.
This setting has worked remarkably well. At the end of the year I’ll do a full comparison of the water used between the two summers, but the data is already looking pretty good. We’re using more water at the times we need it and saving money other times.
This sprinkler controller is basically someone’s grown up hobby project, but it sure is handy. It has definitely paid for itself already.
It’s almost time to start up the weekly fantasy football posts again! We had our draft on Friday so the teams are set. Yahoos super accurate, never incorrect stat predictions say that I’ll score the most points this season based on the people we drafted.
Last year we stocked up to prepare for a 3-4 day emergency so we’d still have food, water, etc. Those kits rapidly expire so we needed a way to stay on top of it. Today was the First Bi-Annual Survival Sunday. Here’s our current list of activities for these Survival Sundays:
Best Of YouTube
Jimmy Diresta starts off this week’s collection with a demonstration of a cool new CNC tool. It’s a standard router on a small handheld platform. You move it in the general direction that it needs to go and then it uses a camera to know where it is and make small adjustments to perfectly cut the design you loaded into it. This device has been in the works for quite a while and it looks like they are making a press push this week so there are lots of other videos available from other makers if you want more info.
The crazy Colin Furze is at it again. He built an ENORMOUS 360 degree swing in his back yard. The axle is the same height as his gutters. I hope his life insurance company doesn’t watch this. If you like this video, check out the two videos right before it on his channel where he shows you how he designed and made it.
And finally we’ll end with some mind bending physics talk. How can time be faster and slower at the same time depending on your observation point?