Droplet: a smarter, cheaper way to water your garden
Ditch your hosepipe and slash your water consumption by up to 90 percent with this Wi-Fi equipped sprinkler
As the weather heats up, your lawn and plants start to suffer – and that usually results in your water usage going through the roof. Droplet is designed to change all that.
It’s a robotic sprinkler equipped with Wi-Fi and controllable via desktop and iOS apps (Android is “coming soon), and its creators claim it’s capable of keeping your garden healthy and green with just 10 percent of the water you’d use with a regular sprinkler or hosepipe.
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The key is in its smarts. Using the app, you enter the type of plants you need watered and their locations in your garden. Droplet, which hooks directly up to a normal hosepipe, then uses weather and soil data to determine how much water each plant needs and the best time to douse it. Each unit can spray a jet up to 30 feet, so depending on the size of your garden you may need only one.
Its makers say it’ll save the average user US$263 (around £150) on water bills per year, not to mention the time that person would usually spend in the garden using a hose or fiddling with their normal sprinkler.
The Droplet unit isn’t particularly cheap at US$300 (£175), but if the savings claims are true it’ll have paid for itself in a little over a year. US residents can pre-order it now at Amazon.com, but there’s no word as yet on a launch in the UK. Given that Droplet currently uses US soil data and weather stations, it may be a while before we see it making the trip across the Atlantic.
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Sam Kieldsen
Contributor 
