A timer setting for every month from your own climate record: how often, how many minutes, the best hour, the municipal rule, and what the usual habits cost instead.
Between about 04:00 and 07:00. The air is cool and still, so little is lost to evaporation and wind, and the leaves dry as the sun comes up, which keeps fungal disease off a lawn. Evening is second best, though a lawn left wet all night is more prone to disease. Midday is the worst: a fifth or more of the water never reaches the roots, and in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni it is against the rules.
Less often and more deeply than most people do. A lawn on loam wants about 15 to 20 mm at a time, which carries it two or three days in high summer and a fortnight or more in autumn. Kikuyu, LM and buffalo go dormant in a cold winter and need a soak once a month at most. The schedule gives the setting for each month; the rule in between is to skip a session when 10 mm or more has fallen.
It depends entirely on how fast they put water down. Pop-up sprays deliver about 35 mm an hour, rotors about 15, a hose-end sprinkler about 13, so the same 15 mm takes 25 minutes on one system and an hour on another. Catalogue figures are a guide; the catch-can test on your results page measures your own.
Cape Town bars watering between 09:00 and 18:00 all year under its Water By-law, borehole water included. Johannesburg’s Level 1 restrictions bar it between 06:00 and 18:00 from September to March, and between 08:00 and 16:00 in winter. Tshwane and Ekurhuleni have declared 06:00 to 18:00 under their own Level 1 notices. The schedule shows the rule for your address with its source and the date we checked it; where we hold none, it says so.
A dormant warm-season lawn still needs its crowns kept alive: one deep watering a month in a dry Highveld winter, none at all where winter brings rain. Evergreen lawns, beds and vegetables keep drinking, though far less, because the days are short and cool. The schedule follows your temperature record, so a Durban lawn is not treated like a Bloemfontein one.
No. The address goes to a geocoding service, the map position to the providers of the aerial photos, and your location, rounded to about a kilometre, to NASA for the climate record. Your outline and your answers never reach us; the schedule is worked out in your browser.