Small strips of grass near sidewalks are some of the hardest areas for me to irrigate. Especially if I am trying to retrofit a poorly designed area. The heads are just never spaced right. We all know that this wastes water, but have you ever thought about how much?
In our case, we were able to change out heads along a 125 ft sidewalk that is 6 ft wide. I still have irrigation hitting about a foot on average. Before we changed it, the sidewalk was being covered almost 100%. You can see one nozzle we did not change in the picture above for an illustration.
Lets look at the math. Our constants are : 1 acre inch of water = 27,154 gallons of water and our square footage that is now dry is 600 sq. ft. We irrigate for roughly 6 months, and we will use a standard of one inch of water a week. This works out to 374 gallons of water a week, or 9724 gallons of water this irrigation season.
All we did was switch HE-Van nozzles to MPRotators. Technically we saved a lot more water because I did not up the run time on the zone after we changed them. I was just showing the amount of water that we had hitting the sidewalk before. There is no excuse for water hitting concrete. It does happen sometimes, and there are areas that you cannot help it without major renovation, but in general, water stays on the landscape. Look at making some small nozzle changes this season!