DropLyt

An innovative solution to irrigation water waste.

For households across the United States, the single greatest usage of water is irrigation for lawns and gardens. Unfortunately, this usage of water also has the highest rate of wastage, with only 50% of water put towards irrigation actually making it to the plants. [1] In order to combat this, most modern irrigation schemes introduce redundancies that further exacerbate this waste of water.

As outdoor landscaping is fairly ubiquitous throughout the United States, the carbon impact of this wastage cannot be understated. Every 1,000 gallons of water wasted amounts to 85 pounds of carbon returning to the atmosphere. [2] Across the 125 million households in the United States, [3] an average of 25,000 gallons of water—and, therefore, 2125 pounds of carbon—are wasted every single year. [4]

Our team aims to solve this problem using a layered approach, integrating several levels of technology to reduce wastage on every step of the irrigation process.

Step 1: Placement

Redundancy is a sizable issue in sprinkler placement. In order to prioritize soil soakage, modern irrigation systems are often placed inefficiently, resulting in the risk of overwatering and leakeage. Our system begins by addressing this issue.

When users register with our app, they begin by entering their address. We then scrape the Nominatim API with their address, retrieving their parcel of land, the term that encompasses the boundaries of their ownership. [5] Within this parcel, users indicate where their lawns are, which is translated to a polygon in our backend.

Armed with the information about the shape of the user's plot, our app proceeds to execute the sprinkler placement algorithm. Using this dynamic radius selection, we effectively determine the most efficient arrangement of the sprinklers to minimize wastage while maximizing coverage.

Step 2: Timing

One of the biggest reasons that water is wasted when irrigating is the time of day that people irrigate. Our app provides the flexibility of schedule generation, informing users about the ideal time to run their sprinklers. After users determine where to place the sprinklers, the app then tells them when to run them. By selecting the time that is soon before sunrise, the water has the highest chance of being completely absorbed before evaporation can occur, while preventing fungal growth from oversaturation. [8]

Evaporation during the day is, however, a major problem. So, we decided to tackle that too!

Step 3: Duration

How much water is enough? Sprinklers run longer in the summer because the soil is more parched. But this is often done naively, resulting in—you guessed it—even more water wastage. [9] Therefore, the app then informs the users of the critical last step of water savings: how long to run their sprinklers for before the soil is sufficiently irrigated.

Our app introduces a novel process to compute the optimal amount of water the soil needs, therefore preventing overwatering and wastage. The app determines the evaporative transpiration—or the rate at which water is leaving the soil and plants in the soil—at the time that the sprinklers are turned on. [10]

Our app finally combines this data with plant information to determine how much water needs to be put into the soil. It then matches the flow rate of the sprinklers being installed to calculate the amount of time that the sprinklers need to be turned on. By exactly turning them on for the amount of time necessary to combat the evaporation, we essentially negate the effects of evaporation and further minimize wastage.

What does this amount to?

As per our estimates, this system manages to save 8,000 gallons a year from the placement and 12,000 gallons a year from the timing and duration, enabling users to cut their water wastage from 25,000 gallons a year to 5,000 gallons a year, amounting to an 80% decrease in irrigation-related wastage. This is a reduction of 1700 pounds of carbon per household per year! This also reduces the overall water cost of households by over 20%, resulting in a sizable benefit for both the sustainability of the households, and their affordability.

What's next?

Through our fullstack solution, we have demonstrated that we can engineer more sustainable water usage for residential properties. But why stop there? Water usage is substantial in golf courses, farms, and the cherished green architecture that adorns so many tech campuses.

Our solution naturally scales with only a marginal increase in computational processing. Starting from your backyard, DropLyt can potentially impact the largest areas of water wastage across the country and the globe, computationally finding the most efficient way to deliver water where it is needed.

So, let's start here. Let's think carefully about how we use water, and where we can save it. The future is in our hands. Nurture growth. Save water. Use DropLyt!

Core technologies: React, TypeScript, Mathematica, SupaBase, Next, Tailwind, Flask, Railway, NodeJS, Deno