Power Outage May Cause Sprinkler Timers to Double Water Usage

Source: City of Santa Barbara

The recent power outages can affect some older brands of sprinkler timers, potentially causing increased water usage and higher water bills. If your sprinkler timer’s back-up battery is missing or dead, you may lose all of your program settings and the default settings on your timer will become active. The default program waters every station, every start time, every day, for 10 minutes at midnight- often doubling water usage and water bills.

Make sure to check the settings on your sprinkler timer after a power outage. You may need to reprogram the timer and put in a fresh back-up battery. Changing the battery in your sprinkler timer every year, at the same time as you change your smoke alarm battery, can save you thousands of gallons of water.

For more information on how to program your sprinkler timer, visit www.SantaBarbaraCA.gov/Irrigation or call (805) 564-5460 to schedule a free Irrigation Evaluation appointment. Let’s save together!