I drag out my hose and sprinkler one a week starting in mid May. My lawn looks really nice. I’ve got about 5000 square feet of grass.

Many of my customers ask why their lawns turn brown every summer. I always tell them they need to water. This causes a visceral reaction “but that’s expensive”. I admittedly have no data on what irrigating a lawn costs and an wondering if you have any data to share. How much does it cost to water the lawn? How large is your lawn?

One acre lawn in south Florida… looking at a $400 water bill if you don’t have a well. The well was $3500… it basically pays for itself in short order.

In about a year or so the well pays for itself and then it’s free water after that!

We have St Augustine grass and it drinks a lot of water in the dry season. It looks great all year, but you have to water it pretty heavily.

4800 SF of Bermuda that I water 1x per week unless it rains.

I think the added water consumption is costing me about $50 more per mo so far but were not in the hot part yet.

About 5000 mowable sq ft of St. Augustine and it's beautiful March thru November. Every winter, my water bill gets down to ~$80/month. Late summer, my water bill gets up to ~$180/month. We need about 1.5" inches of water a week June thru Sept to keep a green lawn so if it doesn't rain then I'm running the underground sprinkling to make up for it.

BTW, our billing sucks as we pay huge fees every month for the privilege of having water (i.e. it's the majority of the bill when it gets down to ~$80/month) and then every January we pay MUD taxes to the tune of 1.1% of our home's assessed value to pay off the cost of the bonds for installing the water and sewer to our neighborhood. Eventually, the HOA has to sue the MUD to get the MUD taxes lowered/eliminated.

My buddy lives about a 1/2 mile away in a neighborhood with 1 to 2 acre lots. His lot is an acre and prior to moving in he had a well installed so his water bill is about $80/month year around. Meanwhile, his neighbors bills get up to $600 or $700/month in the summer. On top of the monster lawn, he has a 30 tree citrus orchard on it so believe me the well is pushing out the water. His well paid for itself the first summer and he's lived there for 12 years.

Thank you.

I’d imagine up north we can get away with a little less water up north (about 50 miles north of Pittsburgh). However, it did almost hit 100° today. I was sure glad that a storm rolled through this evening.

I put about 4000 gallons/month depending on weather (approx. 1/3 acre of grass) on my lawn. My water bill is about $45/month.

It's probably easier to compare cubic feet used rather than cost as all rates are different.

I have a house where they use a tiered water rating system. For example, if you're under 1500cf total used it's $ 5.43/100. But if you go over 4800cf the rate goes up to 25.06/100.

I've been afraid of irrigating it for that reason. I don't need a $1200 water bill or more.

No idea. Unless there's a rain delay we water our ~25,000 sqft. of lawn and garden for 4-1/2 hours every other day. I estimate the zones average 15 GPM. So around 4,000 gal./watering (541 CF) or up to 60,000 gal./ month (8,000 CF). Luckily, we're on well water. Ever since we upgraded the well pump to a VFD, our electricity consumption has declined dramatically.

I just looked up our township's irrigation water rates. It would cost us about $230/mo.

Once we get into our summertime weather which is coming late this year (no fucking rain) and daytime temps high 90's to 100+, twice a week watering is needed or else you lose it all. I figure $100 added to the normal bill. That's just the norm in north Texas. We're right on the cusp of going full Arizona lawn (bunch of rocks)

Mark one way to get the answer is to buy a water/flow meter and run it inline to your sprinkler.

I don't think this is exactly a thread drift, I think it's important when figuring out how much to water, but my neighbor decided last year to have a golf course putting green front yard. He bought a really fancy mower, cost a lot of money, just like those you'll see on a golf course. He also put in a below ground popup sprinkler system.

First, obviously you need to water enough but not too much and therefore wasting water.

This past weekend he had all these orange cones scattered around his front yard.

I asked him what's up with those things.

He replied that they are Orbit brand Water Catch Cups. (just google that to see). They are a little spike and holder for the orange catch cups. He had something like a dozen scattered around the front yard. He had a clipboard in hand and was reading how much water was in each catch cup, dumping it out and putting it back in.

He told me the purpose of this was to see not just how much water he was applying, over time, and just as important or probably more important was how each sprinkler head was doing. He was actually calculating how each sprinkler head was consistent and accurate!

Our water here is cheap and plentiful but he was concerned about the cost of watering. Go figure. No pun intended.

Here is an example of Orbit Water Catch Cups to Purchase

I use 26,000-30,000 gallons of water per month on the lawn. Sprinklers 2x per week, 160 minutes each time they're on (4 zones, 36 minutes each zone, twice a week). We have re-claimed water here (treated sewer water) so it costs me about $60 a month.

I water about 2.5 acres for 12 hours a day. About $125 per month.

Ours does not cost anything. All of the houses in our area are part of "Project Apricot" (who dreams up these names?). This is a second supply of water from the city. It's reclaimed, recycled water for irrigation. Our water bill includes a flat-rate availability charge for this, whether you use it or not. It is not metered, so usage costs nothing.

We’re in a similar boat as Vtail.. We live on a hydro electric lake and the water is free..although we use a 220 V pump to lift it from the lake which is a total of 55 vertical feet to the highest point on my property. Just yesterday I increased the two zones that cover the sunniest part of our lawn to 45 minutes each as we are in the 90’s now.

I have well and septic, so when I have a bill, it is a big one. (other than emptying the septic every 3 years for $350)

Two years ago I started watering my lawn only 1x every 4-5 days based on advice from a local landscaper. However, I water thoroughly for 60 minutes. This conditions the roots to grow deeper versus being reliant on a daily 20 minute supply of water. Sort of like the difference between trees in the swamp and trees in the forest. It has been consistently in the 90's here in NH and my lawn is almost as green as it was in early May.

 
We are on a shared well (3 properties), and we installed meters on each line so we could equitably divide up the electric bill based on usage. So we have all this stuff charted in a spreadsheet.
 
We water a 1,000 sq ft circle of Bermuda every 3 days during the hot months, and 5 trees every 5 days year round. On average, our gallons used during the summer goes up about by about 5,000.

Nominal, I pump water out of the lake so it only costs the electricity to run the 2 HP pump for about 6 hours every day. I water about 2-1/2 or 3 acres of lawn

On a well so no water bill, but my power bill goes up quite a bit.

Since Death Valley gets more rain in the summer than I do, I end up watering each zone for 15 minutes twice a day. That adds up.

If you wanted to estimate the cost of watering a lawn over a week, you'd want to know how much your customers are charged for water, plus how many inches of watering you expect them to water per week.

House in KDH has city water, usually costs about $9 per thousand gallons. I don't know that's typical, but let's go with that for back of the envelope. There's 133 cubic feet in a thousand gallons, so $9/1,000 gallons is about 7 cents per cubic foot.

So, say you want someone with 1000 square feet of lawn who pays 7 cents a cubic foot to water 2 inches per week. 2 inches depth (2/12 feet) depth times 1000 square feet to cover is 166.7 cubic feet of water per week. At 7 cents per cubic foot, that'd be about $11.70 per week.

In PNW, our acre+ of mowable "lawn" does not get watered from our domestic well. The notion of 'seasonal region dormancy' is adequate for our lawn watering schedule. With what otherwise would be a 9+ month mowing season, a few months of slack mowing time is welcome, and our admittedly shaggy weed-patch with grass, is not the goal of many homeowners.

Plus it creates an interesting variation in the texture & colors, not unlike the seasonal changing of the tree leaves, except the September return of the green from the golds, yellows & browns of July-August.

My brother irrigates his acre of lawn in Boise, from a canal-water-rights project. Something less than $50/year the last I asked, for 12 hour ditch rights once a week during season, I forget the head-flow amount. Always a healthy & annoying green requiring unending bagging of the cut grass and regular fertilizing/weed application.