The end of summer is a do-or-die time for a lawn. When drought conditions persist, grass might not come back the same when cooler and wetter months arrive in fall, unless it gets some help. I don’t particularly care about my lawn on principle — heck, I’d actually rather kill it — but my dog loves playing catch on the grass, so I'd like it to stay relatively nice. A few weeks back, as I picked up his ball, it became all too clear to me that the brown spiky carpet wasn’t a friendly environment for his old paws, and things weren't likely to get better on their own.
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Melnor MiniMax Oscillating Sprinkler Read More
Why most sprinklers struggle
I didn’t intend to let my lawn die this year. In fact, I got off on the right foot by aerating, top dressing and overseeding in spring. Things were perfect when there was just free water falling from the sky. And that's partly why I didn’t get around to the ambitious project of installing hundreds of feet of PVC sprinkler lines that would be necessary to adequately water my irregularly shaped lawn.
Instead, I made a number attempts to water the lawn throughout the past few months with an arsenal of simpler sprinklers, but each one failed me in new ways.
My basic $14 a basic oscillating sprinkler spread too wide to be useful in narrow sections of my lawn. It was wasting water with overspray.
The one vintage impact sprinkler I’d been using for years fractured at the lawn spike making it virtually impossible to position. It got me in trouble for spraying my wife's iPad through an open window.
I then bought a set of impact sprinklers for under $10 that broke during the first setup. Perhaps a casualty of sun-damaged from sitting outside on the big box store shelf for years.
Every time a sprinkler would fail, I would feel like the bigger failure, left unable to completely cover the zones of my lawn that needed water.
How the Melnor MiniMax Oscillator succeeds
While on a walk with the dog, we passed a house with a perfect lawn. My first instinct was to scoff that the sprinkler was running during the heat of the day (rookie mistake), but then I got distracted by the sprinkler itself: a boxy black affair with brightly colored adjustment levers, unlike the various types I knew all too well for letting me down. It was the Melnor MiniMax Oscillator Sprinkler, I would later learn from a very helpful lawn and garden customer service representative at my local Jerry’s Home Improvement. “It’s fully adjustable,” Rhonda said as she proceeded to take the MiniMax out of the box to demonstrate the features.
The base lays flat on the lawn but there is also a tripod version too.
Flow rate is controlled using this knob located on the side. While pointed away from you, dialing the desired distance is easy.
Forward and backward sweeping start and stop points are adjusted on each side of the sprinkler head.
Using tabs attached to the sprinkler nozzles, you can easily adjust the angle to accommodate side-to-side width.
And lastly, the sprinkler head is 360-degree rotatable.
While the MiniMax's advanced adjustable options are a lawn-saver for those of us with strangely shaped yards, it's not necessarily for everyone. At upwards of $40, it's a far cry more expensive than your average impact sprinkler, which may serve you well enough depending on your needs. For filling in awkard gaps, however, you could hardly find a better option than the MiniMax.
It hasn't been a single-purchase lawn fix. I might still invest in a smart water timer like the Orbit B-hyve to help me stay on schedule because long and infrequent waterings are actually better for your lawn to promote deep root development. But I’m probably never going to get around to installing a full sprinkler system that wastes water every other day.
I'd much rather use that time to play fetch.
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