The USU Extension office in Carbon County is offering a free service to the community to improve efficient use of water for landscape irrigation in their yards. The Water Check program was started in our area about four years ago and works closely with Price City.

Ron Patterson, Extension Agent spoke about the program, “We really want to do something about conserving water and so it’s kind of a cooperative effort that started between with extension and Price City to try and encourage people to be water wise or conservative in their water use, especially in their landscape situations.” Urban landscape irrigation accounts for 50-65 percent of the annual municipal water use. Many times home owners fail to check their systems at the beginning of each growing season before running sprinklers for the first time.

The Water Check program offers free irrigation checks of the homeowner’s sprinkler system. The evaluator takes approximately an hour to run a few simple tests to gather data.  “Using those catch cans we can determine two things which would be the distribution uniformity, how evenly your system is putting water out over the lawn and it will also check the precipitation rate,” said Peterson. “There are some things we kind of look at to make sure that the distribution is good, you’re not going to ever get a 100 percent distribution/uniformity but we would like to get it up around 65-75 percent depending on the type of sprinkler head you are using.” Once testing is completed the information is used to recommend repair/exchange of spouts and a watering schedule customized to the homeowner’s landscape.

This is a no cost program and participants must have an in-ground, automatic sprinkler system. Patterson concluded with, “We are mostly doing lawns we don’t do the shrubs and the flowers because the catch cans get blocked by the water, plants can block that but mostly we do the lawns but it’s just a great opportunity to get better informed on what you’re doing on your landscape.”

To schedule your Water Check call the USU Extension office at 636-3233.