A motion activated sprinkler was never on my mind when I lived in an apartment, but after I purchased my first house, I realized that I had a few issues to handle that I never really thought would be as big of a problem. The problem was animals that were invading my property and doing all sort of damage to my lawn and backyard. I knew something had to be done to protect my property from those pesky deer. I had some mulch that was placed next to this nice palm tree in my yard, every day I would wake up and find that the mulch was scattered all over the grass. The mulch being scattered everywhere was bad enough, but the poop they left all over the place was unbearable. I am a type of person who does not own any pets because picking up their crap was the one thing I could not do. So when I found myself scooping up deer poo from my lawn, backyard, and even porch, I had hit the point where I couldn’t take any more of these deer destroying my yard, so getting rid of them was my top priority. I had tried to do so many different things to get rid of them. The first thing I tried was to use a garden scarecrow like how farmers use on the farms to scare birds away from the crops. I had a few scarecrows in the shed from halloween decorations so I used them. Unfortunately it did not scare off the intruders. I did notice there weren’t anymore birds visiting my yard anymore but that wasn’t my objective. Not only that, my neighbors were telling me I had my Halloween decorations out too early and I just looked crazy in their eyes so I had to take the garden scarecrows down and try something else.
After discussing about my issue at work, one of my co-workers told me to try a motion sensor sprinkler system. Motion activated sprinklers are pretty much, as they say, a motion detector that sprays animals or any moving intruder that comes in a range of the water sprinkler. My co-worker had the same problem as me and said the motion sensor sprinklers helped him out a lot. At first I was a little skeptical, could this really solve my problem? Well I felt defeated at my past attempts with the garden scarecrow and I was not willing to lose my lawn to these animal intruders so I purchased the scarecrow motion activated sprinkler. When the water sprinkler arrived I was kind of shocked by how large it actually was but I guess the motion sensor takes up a lot of it.
I unboxed the scarecrow sprinkler system, read the instructions, set it up in the yard, connected the sprinkler hose, turned no the tap and waited for something to activate the sprinkler. Finally a few birds landed in the yard and within a second, the water sprinkler turned on and started to spray the yard with water and the birds immediately flew away. It made me laugh but the real test would be if it would work on the deer coming into the yard. I set up a few gopro cameras to record what happens when the deer come around. The next day I watched the Gopro footage and to my surprise that no deer had come into my yard but a few raccoons. As the raccoons got in range of the motion activated sprinkler, the sprinkler turned on and sprayed them and the raccoons went running! The Scarecrow Sprinkler worked like a charm.
While there other ways to keep your lawn safe, the sprinklers seemed like the best and safest choice.
I don’t want to hurt any of these animals, I just want to scare them off, and that is what is really great about these motion sensor sprinklers. I know there are other methods which include poisonous baits but I feel that is really inhumane. Also what if you had a dog and it accidentally ate one of the baits? Not good! Plus, do you really want some poisonous stuff in your yard? For you own safety I would recommend not going the bait option.
My co-worker also had issues with cats entering his flower beds and pooping in the soil which is pretty gross! His first option was to try and put netting around his flowers but it looked ugly and the cats were still able to get into the flower bed. He also tried a cat away spray because cats don’t seem to like citrus but that did not work either. So he tried the motion activated sprinkler and it did the job and kept the cats out of his flowers.
If I remember correctly I purchased my scarecrow sprinkler from Home Depot for around $70 but have seen a bigger selection on Amazon. So, if you are having the same issues or similar, I would definitely get myself a motion activated sprinkler system. I need a few more sprinklers because I have a big yard, so I will be buying some other brands and models to test out and give some reviews here. Some I will just give my opinion on.
Edit: The best motion activated sprinkler system is the Orbit 62100 and I reviewed the Orbit 62100 Yard Enforcer Motion Activated Sprinkler here.
