Smart Garden: How to upgrade your garden

Smart Home is not necessarily limited to the inside of your house. Your garden can also be upgraded with all kinds of smart technology. Let us give you an overview of the possibilities a Smart Garden offers and how to benefit from the advantages of smart technology.

Mowing robots take over the tiresome lawn mowing

There are supposed to be people who enjoy mowing the lawn. If you are not one of them, a mowing robot is exactly the right thing for you. It is basically the counterpart to the vacuum robot in the house and takes care of a well-tended lawn outside.

Many “smart sheep”, as one could affectionately call a mowing robot, require the one-time effort of installing a boundary wire. However, there are already mowing robots today that work without them. Many lawnmower robots work via smartphone or even by voice command. They regularly mow the lawns in your garden according to previously established mowing plans, whereby intelligent models, like the ones from Gadena, Worx and others, even take the grass growth into account.

Smart sprinklers can save a lot of water

Sprinkling the lawn and watering the beds is another recurring task that has to be done on a regular basis, especially in dry summers. Good news for you, there are smart solutions available that can even help to save water.

Smart garden watering systems often use sensors to determine the moisture level of the soil, and take weather forecasts into consideration. This allows to adjust the amount of water distributed in the garden via a droplet hose and sprinklers to the current conditions. You’ll realise how useful it is when you’ve had to spend a lot of time and effort watering each plant in the garden one by one – and then shortly afterwards a summer thunderstorm brings rain anyway. With smart and automated irrigation, this is not going to happen. But also the opposite case is considered: In spring, plants and seeds are carefully planted, but in the hot season it is difficult to keep up with watering. Smart irrigation also takes care of these effects and precisely meets the water requirements of your radishes and co.

However, a Smart Home or Smart Garden is supposed to provide more comfort, but also might save resources. If you have the opportunity, try to spill rainwater collected from the tap instead of using precious drinking water. Rainwater can be spread in the garden with a controllable pump, also intelligently dosed.

Smart lighting for safety and ambiance

Inside the house, smart lighting is often the way people try to adapt to the Smart Home concept. Of course, smart lighting can also be used in the garden. Various manufacturers, like Philips Hue and Innr, offer a wide range of garden lights, light strips and more. So you can easily set your garden in the right light.

There are many possibilities: You can use spots to highlight special plants in the garden, other lamps light the paths and the terrace. In the garden shed the light turns on automatically as soon as you unlock the door. Since the lamps are dimmable and can often be lit in many different colours, you can create the right ambience according to your preferences.
Besides, garden lighting also ensures a higher level of safety. Motion detectors in the garden switch the lighting at maximum brightness at night to avoid uninvited guests. Speaking of security: security cameras can be installed outside the house to keep an eye on your garden and the surroundings even on the go.

Your own weather station and photovoltaic system in the garden

Talking about irrigation, smart weather monitoring has already been dropped. However, a smart weather station, such as the one from Netatmo, offers even more. It monitors and forecasts not only rainfall but also temperature, air pressure and wind – while sitting on your sofa, you note the current weather situation and how it is likely to be in the next few hours.

Of course a garden offers many more possibilities. For example, if you do not have a suitable roof, you can install a mini photovoltaic system in your garden which generates electricity from sunlight. The collected energy might be used smartly in the house and garden, for example to charge the batteries of mowing robots and many more. In this way you save electricity and thus money in the long term.