Sprinklers

Sprinklers

Design it. Dig it. Program it.

An irrigation design game that’s also the real thing. Learn the trade on twelve Coolamon Bay yards, then draw your own, press Design it for me, and take a printable plan and parts list to the shop.

  • No ads
  • No account
  • Nothing to buy
  • Metric, in AUD
Play in your browser
iPhone beta on TestFlight Android beta on Google Play
A lawn watered head to head A 12 by 9 metre lawn drawn from above on a plan grid. Nine rotary heads, drawn as circles with their arc wedge: four 90 degree corners, four 180 degree edges and one 360 in the middle. The lawn is shaded by how many heads reach each half-metre square, and every square ends up reached by at least two. 5 m 12 m9 m
Head to head

Corners, then edges, then the middle. The lawn’s done when every square is reached by two heads.

  • Dry
  • One head
  • Two or more
The real Heads station on the Front lawn job: four corner heads placed, the lawn red where it’s still dry and amber where one head reaches, the edge and middle heads still to place, and a Now the edges button.

Your yard, station by station

Seven stops from a bare block to water on the lawn. Take the quick lane and it’s three taps and a button. Every station stays open if you want to do it by hand.

  1. Find your yard

    Type your address and the lot comes off the council map: the boundary, the house, the pool. The backyard is a guess, and it says which bits are. No address handy? Start from a Coolamon Bay yard, or a blank block you give a width and depth.

  2. Paint it

    Lawn, garden bed, veggies, paving, pool, pots, and keep-dry for the bits that must stay that way. Brush, box, shape or fill, with undo on everything. Trees and the shed go on as things, because a tree blocks a spray and a shed blocks a pipe. Or lay a photo of your own sketch underneath and paint over it.

    The yard editor on a Coolamon Bay back yard from above: lawn in the middle, garden beds round the fences, a big tree, a shed, and the tap and power point on the house wall. Paint tools for lawn, garden bed and veggies, and a Design it for me button.

  3. Mark the taps

    Drag the tap onto the wall and the power point where the controller will live. Then the bucket test: time how long a 9 litre bucket takes to fill and read the pressure gauge, and Sprinklers knows what your tap can actually run. Type your numbers, or play the bucket game to get them.

    Two numbers. That’s the whole survey.

  4. Design it for me

    One button. The Designer places the heads, groups them into zones your tap can carry, routes the pipe, fits the valve box, and wires and programs the controller. Every check comes up green, and each station gets a three-line card on why it went that way.

    Results after Design it for me on Back yard with beds: three stars, distribution uniformity 78.4 percent, hydraulics in range and to code, A$1,629.70 in parts, 99.4 metres of trench for 4 zones and 11 heads, 4.3 kilolitres of water a week, and the neighbour’s driveway 0 percent wet.

  5. Preview and tweak

    It’s your design now. Open any station and change it: drag a head, swing its arc, dial the radius back. The coverage map repaints as you go, red for dry, amber for one head, green for head to head, and the checks say what’s off and which station fixes it. Then run the water and watch each zone come on.

    You’ve spaced those like they’re social distancing.

    The Heads station on the Front lawn job: four corner heads placed, the lawn red where it’s still dry and amber where one head reaches, the edge and middle heads still to place as ghosts, and a Now the edges button.

  6. Export the plan and parts list

    A scaled plan, the parts list as a PDF and a spreadsheet, the zone table and the controller program card. Shared straight from your phone to the printer, the shop counter or whoever’s helping you dig.

    The bill of materials for Back yard with beds: 28 lines, 4 zones, A$1,629.70. Buttons for the parts list CSV and PDF, plan PNG, zone table and program card, then heads and nozzles with their colour chips, and pipe and fittings, each with quantity and price.

  7. Install it, step by step

    The install guide takes the job in the order it goes in the ground, from the fittings at the tap to the last head and the controller on the wall. Anything that’s a licensed plumber’s job is marked as one, with the labour on the parts list, so you know which bits are yours.

    Filter before the regulator. Grit hates a valve.

    The Pipe station on the Designer’s plan for Back yard with beds: mainline and laterals drawn in each zone’s colour, the valve box by the house, and the pressure at each zone’s last head, 325 kPa on the west lawn against the 200 it wants.

Learn it on Coolamon Bay. Then do your place.

Same engine, same checks, same Designer. One lane is a game, the other is your backyard.

Career

Twelve jobs round the bay, each one teaching one thing a good irrigation tradie knows. Three stars a job: even watering, hydraulics to code, and cost.

  1. 1Nature strip onlyhead to head
  2. 2Front lawnflow against the tap
  3. 3Back yard with bedsfirst drip zone
  4. 4Veggie gardencycle and soak
  5. 5Sloped blockpressure on a hill
  6. 6Corner blockstrips and sleeves
  7. 7Big block, low flowthe second tap
  8. 8Retrofitfix someone else’s
  9. 9Bowls greenrotors, tight DU
  10. 10School ovalsub-boxes
  11. 11Caravan parkmany small zones
  12. 12Community gardensixteen stations
ApprenticeTradieDesignerMaster

Apprentice shows you where the heads go. Master hides the checks until the water’s on.

The Career screen: 7 of 36 stars, Nature strip only with three stars and Front lawn with two, each with its brief, what it teaches, and a difficulty picker from Apprentice to Master.

My Yard

Your yard, your tap, your rules. Well, the water authority’s rules. Everything is open from the start: the Designer is free and unlimited, the PDF parts list is always on, and Career never gates a thing.

Start from your address, a Coolamon Bay yard or a blank block. Save as many yards as you like, and come back to any of them.

The yard editor on a laptop-sized screen: the back yard from above among the neighbouring houses, with paint, things, tap and photo tools along the bottom.
The browser version is the whole app, on a big screen too.

What you take to the shop

Five things come out of every design, and they’re yours to print, send or hand over the counter.

Your design, exportedFrom the parts list screen · shared from your phone

  1. The plan

    PNG

    The yard to scale, with every head, arc, pipe, valve box and wire colour, a title strip and a scale bar.

  2. The parts list

    PDFCSV

    Every part with its code, nozzle colour chip, quantity and price, grouped by station. Licensed-plumber work sits on its own lines, marked.

  3. The zone table

    CSV

    Each zone’s heads, flow, precipitation rate and nozzle family, for sizing and for the next person to touch it.

  4. The controller program

    PNG

    Station labels, minutes per run, days and start times, with cycle and soak where the soil needs it. Early morning by default.

  5. The install guide

    In the app

    The job in the order it goes in the ground, one step at a time.

Every brand in the catalogue is made up. The specs and prices are shaped like the real ones, so the list translates at the counter.

The parts list screen: Take it to the shop, with Parts list CSV, Parts list PDF, Plan PNG, Zone table and Program card, above the heads and nozzles with their colour chips and prices.

Designed by the numbers

The rules an irrigation designer works to, checked live on every design, yours or the Designer’s. Break one and the plan shows you where.

Read the design rules →

  • Head to head

    Every patch of lawn gets reached by two heads, and no two heads sit further apart than 55% of the throw’s diameter. Fall short and the map turns amber, then red.

  • Matched precipitation

    One nozzle family to a zone. A 90° corner puts out a quarter of a 360’s water on a quarter of the circle, so both land the same millimetres an hour. Mix sprays with rotary nozzles and one end floods while the other’s dry.

    Rotary ≈ 10 mm/h · sprays ≈ 40 mm/h

  • Your tap, measured

    Time a 9 litre bucket, read the gauge. Each zone stays under 85% of what your tap gives, pipe is sized to keep water under 1.5 m/s, and the pressure is checked at the last head on every run.

  • Cycle and soak

    Clay takes in about 5 mm an hour and a spray puts down 35 to 45. So a long run on clay or a slope splits into shorter runs an hour apart, and the water goes into the lawn instead of down the gutter.

The Pipe station on a wide screen: the Designer’s plan for Back yard with beds among the neighbouring houses, with pipes in four zone colours, and the pressure at each zone’s last head listed below: 325, 312, 140 and 140 kPa.
The Designer’s plan for Coolamon Bay’s back yard with beds, open on the Pipe station: four zones, each with the pressure left at its last head and what that head wants.

Lawns now. Beds later.

Big yard, small budget, or a free weekend that won’t stretch? Put the lawn zones in first and leave the drip for the beds until you’re ready.

Plan the whole yard once, then build it in stages, so the valve box and the controller have room for the zones still to come, and nobody digs up a finished lawn to run a pipe past it.

A yard in two stages: two lawn zones and their pipe built now, and the garden-bed drip zones dashed in for later. Lawn, west · now Lawn, east · now Beds · later Beds · later

It stays on your phone

No account, no tracking, no ads. One thing ever leaves, and only when you ask it to.

  • Your yards and designs are saved on your phone, with your stars and settings.

  • Exports are made on the phone and shared from it. Nothing is uploaded.

  • An address you look up goes to our yard service to fetch the lot boundary and the map around it. It isn’t kept.

Read the privacy policy

On your phone

Both betas are open to anyone. Or skip the install: the browser version is the same app.

  • Android

    1. Join the Sprinklers Testers group with the Google account your phone uses. It’s just a list: nothing is posted there.
    2. Open the Play testing page, tap Become a tester, then Download it on Google Play.

    If Play says the app isn’t available yet, the beta is still in Google’s review. Try again in a day or two.

    Join the Android beta

  • iPhone

    1. Install TestFlight from the App Store.
    2. Open the Sprinklers beta link on your iPhone and tap Accept, then Install.

    If the link says the beta isn’t accepting testers yet, it’s still in Apple’s review. Try again in a day or two.

    Join the iPhone beta

  • Right now, in a browser

    Career, My Yard, the Designer and every export, on a phone, a tablet or a laptop. No install.

    Play in your browser

Water at dawn.

The lawn’s up before you are.

From the makers of Nature Strip, the lawn-mowing game in the same town. Water it here, mow it there.

Play in your browser
iPhone beta on TestFlight Android beta on Google Play