A company out of California has developed a smart irrigation controller that could impact how we use water, while ensuring lush well maintained landscapes. The Blossom 8 Smart Watering Controller is able to handle eight watering zones, enough for a simple landscape but may prove to be too small for more complex watering needs. It features Wi-Fi connectivity and a sleek, slim, low-profile design. The Blossom 8 appears to be, a simple, cost-effective solution that takes the guesswork out of controlling your sprinklers and simplifies your life.
The cost of a bad controller can be high. You generally find out your irrigation system is not working right when plants turn yellow and weak – plants losses can add up quickly. This is why we hope to test the Blossom 8 in the near future and bring you the results.
Should it turn out to be indeed reliable the unit is attractively priced starting at just $129 ($99 on their current promotion). A great price when it comes to this kind of lifestyle enhancement and eco-friendly use of water.
An early innovator in the smart sprinkler market, Blossom is noted for creating the first 12-zone indoor/outdoor smart watering controller, which debuted to rave reviews. This was no small feat. Designing a smart sprinkler controller that could reliably operate both indoors (inside your garage next to a water heater, for example) and outdoors meant that Blossom had to overcome the many challenges associated with weather conditions.
The great outdoors can also be a formidable obstacle when it comes to connectivity, as typically the controller would be placed outside on a stucco wall — hardly a Wi-Fi friendly environment. Having successfully developed a product that delivered all of the benefits of a smart yard to a 12 zone sprinkler environment — which is at the upper end of most yards — Blossom sought to make this solution available to more homes (most residential sprinkler systems consist of eight stations or less).
Blossom 8 was designed to be ideal for the typical yard’s diverse ecosystem of grass, trees and plants. Tapping into the power of cloud computing, Blossom 8 claims to self-program existing sprinklers based on local forecast and daily data from thousands of weather stations and satellites – combined with user feedback – to create the ideal watering schedule. This might be a huge improvement of conventional rain sensors which in our view don’t really work. Blossom claims their technology handles each section of a yard based on layout and vegetation – this speaks to more rather than fewer zones.
At Sabine’s New House, our testers are eager to try this system out and look forward to providing a full review when that testing is complete. Our initial reservations focus on the number of zones that can be managed and the system’s ability to scale. For instance, the system installed at The Greenwich House, our project house for season one of Sabine’s New House, has an 18 zone system to accommodate various spray and drip zones laid out based on plant material and light conditions around the yard. The team is also reaching out to two other manufacturers of smart irrigation controllers to add to our testing.
We’ll have a full review in a few months. We are excited to test it because reliable irrigation systems hold the promise of great impact on the way in which we water our landscapes and better utilize water resources.
