Smart Sprinklers Tested

I’m getting ready for this year’s big robotic lawnmower review and in an effort to not have my lawn absolutely roasted in the comments section again, I’m trying to get the yard at my new lake house fixed up a little bit. But the lake water irrigation system hasn’t been run in over 10 years, the pump has no power, and I’ve seen at least 10 broken sprinkler heads, so I’m guessing it’s not worth my time to try to salvage.

So, this seemed like a good time to try out some of the smart sprinkler systems that I first saw in the startup area of CES in 2022. This is going to be a relatively short video because it turns out there are really just two brands. Aiper’s got the IrriSense 2 and OtO, the one I originally saw at CES, is still making their Lawn Smart Sprinkler. They’re almost the exact same price and I’ll need two to cover my backyard anyway, so I picked up one of each.

Starting with the Aiper IrriSense 2, it’s a tall, skinny, standalone unit that gets staked into the ground with lawn screws and connected to a spigot with a standard garden hose. Once you’ve got it hooked up to water and power, you use the Aiper app to adjust the pressure and direction of the spray nozzle to map out your yard using waypoints in each corner. If you have flower beds that need to get watered on a different schedule you can easily add those as well.

The OtO looks quite a bit different and instead of being a standalone unit that you stake into the ground, it’s meant to be mounted on a fence, deck, or wall. I hadn’t really considered it when I first installed it, but the higher you mount it off the ground, the better it should perform, not only in terms of range, but also being able to aim the stream over other plants in your yard.

Another big difference with the OtO is the fact that it can be permanently plugged in, like the Aiper, or you can rely on the solar panel on the top for installations where there isn’t power nearby as long as it gets about 4-6 hours of direct sunlight a day. In terms of mapping out your yard areas, the OtO uses a very similar waypoint mapping system but instead of varying just the water pressure like the Aiper IrriSense 2, the OtO also adjusts the arc of the stream. Just like the IrriSense, you can map multiple areas and put them on separate schedules for watering flower beds or even potted plants.

However, despite the similarities of their mapping systems, the way they actually water the yard is much different. The OtO essentially paints the yard using two pretty full-stream jets, and as I mentioned before, to get the furthest range, it increases the arc of those jets, which does cause them to hit the ground with a fair amount of force that can displace soil, especially in bare patches of the lawn.

The Aiper on the other hand uses a tiny piece of rubber to disrupt the main water jet, resulting in the entire area under the jet getting a gentler misting of water. However, the borders of your watering area will experience the same powerful jet effect as the OtO that can cause splashing and displacement of soil. Despite the differences in their stream patterns, I found that they had almost identical range, which for my water pressure was about a 40-foot radius from the base unit.

I’ll measure the water dispersion using catch cups a little later in the video, but one thing I can tell you from the last couple months of using them is that the Aiper’s system that creates a finer mist is definitely more effected by wind than the OtO system that paints the lawn using the two full stream jets. On that subject, both the Aiper and OtO can use local weather forecasts to skip watering based on high winds or rainfall, but one thing that was missing was the option to retry or reschedule a watering if it was cancelled for wind. Also, in addition to using the local weather forecast, the Aiper has an on-unit rain sensor. But for my yard, living on the lake we occasionally get strong gusts of wind out of nowhere that pushed the Aiper’s water jet onto its own rain sensor, and that caused it to stop watering in the middle of a job on more than one occasion, so I ended up turning that sensor off.

In terms of scheduling, I’ve always found irrigation systems to be a little confusing in terms of how much water my lawn actually needs, but the Aiper uses depth of water per irrigation as the main metric for scheduling, while the OtO uses weekly watering limits and then adjusts the water per scheduled event to hit that limit.

But we shouldn’t just trust the app when it comes to how much water it is actually laying down, so I got out my irrigation catch cups and here’s what I found.

On the first test run, the IrriSense was set to water a quarter inch, but in the 37-minute irrigation it laid down closer to an 1/8”. You can see that the furthest point that it was able to hit during the mapping process stayed completely dry and the two cups closest to the seawall got significantly less water than the others due to the fact that there was wind coming off the lake towards the house. If we throw out the two low measurements that may have been outside of the range of the IrriSense due to wind, the interior cups had an 82% distribution uniformity, which is a great result.

In trial two, the IrriSense was set to a quarter inch again, and again it ran for 37 minutes and laid down under an 1/8” of water. You can see that it still failed to reach the furthest point on the lawn and also struggled to reach the top corner in this run. If we throw out the range related cups on this one, the IrriSense has a lower but still respectable 62% distribution uniformity.

Last, for the third trial, I wanted to eliminate the range variable completely, so I placed all the cups in a more uniform pattern that was easily inside the IrriSense’s range, and I also selected a half inch of depth for the water level. In this trial, counting all 12 cups, the IrriSense had the best distribution uniformity yet at 85%, but after the 81-minute run even the fullest cup still had less than a quarter inch of water in it.

Averaging all three trials gives the IrriSense a 76% distribution uniformity overall, but it definitely struggles near the edge of its range and for some reason it always waters less than half the amount it says it will in the app.

Next, I repeated those same tests on the OtO. For the OtO’s first trial, I used the manual run option that has a minimum watering amount of a quarter inch, and that caused the OtO to run for 1 hour and 48 minutes which is basically three times as long as the IrriSense. Just like the IrriSense, the OtO struggled near the edge of its range, even though it was able to hit those spots during the mapping process. While the OtO did apply almost exactly a quarter inch of water when averaging all the cups, the distribution was a mess. Again, if we throw out the two cups at the edge of the range, the OtO still had just a 50% distribution uniformity with some cups collecting as much as 0.4” of water while others had less than 0.1” and there didn’t really even seem to be any pattern to the inconsistency.

In the second trial, I did find an option to do a 1/8” watering and that caused the OtO to run for just over an hour. In this run, the average was a bit over 1/8”, but still closer to the target water depth than the Aiper. However, the distribution on this second trial was significantly worse than the first, and even after putting the furthest cup almost 5 feet closer, it still failed to provide any meaningful amount of water to that location. Even if we give the OtO the benefit of the doubt assuming that the two lowest amounts were a range issue and throw them out, the resulting distribution uniformity was 40%, again with some areas getting more than 4x as much water as other close by areas.

In the last trial, I again wanted to eliminate the range variable completely, so I placed each cup in a uniform pattern well inside the OtO’s range, and in this trial the OtO still had a very poor distribution uniformity with the fullest cup coming in at 0.32” of water, while the cups closer to the OtO had four times less water at just 0.08”, resulting in a distribution uniformity of 50%.

Combining the OtO’s three trials gives a distribution uniformity of 47% compared to the Aiper’s 76%. Once you know that the Aiper only delivers about half as much water as you select in the app, you can actually get a pretty even and consistent watering pattern as long as you aren’t maxing out its range. In terms of simply acting as an irrigation system, the Aiper was the clear choice since the OtO’s distribution uniformity would require massive overwatering of certain areas in order to get sufficient water to the entire lawn, so I did end up choosing it over the OtO and picked up three more of them to cover my entire property.

So, with that said, I want to talk about some of the general pros and cons of these smart sprinkler systems when compared to traditional in-ground systems, starting with the good stuff. The first is cost, and I know that $500 seems like a ridiculous amount to pay for a single sprinkler but considering that I was able to cover my entire yard with four IrriSense 2 units for less than $2000, that is less than 20% of the $11,000 quote I got to rebuild my in-ground system.

Second, instead of a few days of tearing up your lawn for an in-ground system, these systems install extremely quickly without any lawn damage.

Third, I’ve had in-ground systems for the last 20 years and I’d estimate that I need to repair a sprinkler head or irrigation pipe about once a year. While I feel confident doing that myself, if you don’t like digging in the dirt and working with PVC, then paying for someone to come out and do repairs adds a lot of potential cost to the system. In contrast, the garden hose connections on these smart sprinklers are all above ground and should be serviceable by any homeowner.

Lastly, if you live somewhere that has hard ground freezes, disconnecting your IrriSense and bringing it inside for the winter is much easier than winterizing an irrigation system.

But it’s not all positive, and here are the potential issues I ran into while setting up my 4-unit system.

First, garden hoses are not nearly as leak proof as in ground PVC and the potential for small leaks around the hose bib and connection points is very high. So, those connections will probably need to be checked much more often than a traditional in ground system.

Second, while the Aiper website shows an IrriSense set up in the middle of the yard, it conveniently doesn’t show the garden hose and power wire that would also need to run to that location, and those would obviously cause issues while mowing the lawn. So, these units work best when they’re installed on the edge of the yard where the power and water supply hose don’t need to run through the middle of the lawn. But with an absolute maximum range of around 40 feet, some yards are large enough that you could have unreachable areas.

Related to that, each IrriSense needs both power and water, so you’ll need an available outdoor outlet within about 40 feet and a long enough hose to reach your nearest hose bib. The OtO simplifies that a little bit by adding solar, but you still need to run a hose, so it’s best to install the OtO near the edge of your yard as well.

However, one area where I think the OtO is more thoughtfully designed is that it is built to be mounted to a deck or fence which gets it up off the ground and makes it much easier to mow under it while the IrriSense requires trimming around it. I’m concerned about how well the plastic base will hold up to repeated string trimming.

Last, a concern that I always have with smart devices is that if either of these companies go out of business and shut down their servers, there’s a good chance your sprinklers will be completely useless. The good news is that OtO was acquired by RainBird, which is an American giant when it comes to irrigation equipment. So, not only are they unlikely to go out of business, but in the event that they shut down servers you would have a legitimate case to hold them responsible for a refund. Aiper on the other hand is a Chinese company known for their pool robots. While I don’t see them going out of business any time soon based on the success they’ve had in the pool industry, in the event that they did shut down servers, you’d basically have no recourse against them.

There is a HACS Home Assistant integration for the IrriSense that uses MQTT, but it’s unlikely that system would keep working if Aiper shut down their servers since the integration just communicates with the Aiper AWS server.

One last thing that’s not really a pro or a con at this point but both the Aiper and OtO were originally marketed as having the ability to distribute various nutrients to your lawn by adding cartridges. OtO even had a subscription service for things like fertilizer and pesticides. But it turns out that applying chemicals with irrigation is a heavily regulated process and when RainBird acquired OtO in April of 2025, basically the first thing they did was put an end to the OtO’s ability to accept the cartridges that, it turns out, lacked proper certifications. While my OtO has the compartments for cartridges, it’s missing all the plumbing that used to be inside those compartments.

The IrriSense on the other hand does still has an optional distribution system for their microbial soil amendment, which is certified by the Washington State Department of Agriculture, but it is important to understand that a soil amendment is not a fertilizer, so you’ll probably still need to fertilize manually.

Wrapping up, assuming you have power close to where you want to install your sprinkler and can make the ground level installation work, the Aiper is a significantly better product when it comes to actual sprinkler functionality, and unfortunately, while the OtO is more convenient due to its solar power and fence mounting, it fundamentally fails when it comes to its main purpose of being a sprinkler not only due to the powerful direct water jets that cause soil erosion but more importantly due to the massive inconsistencies in water distribution.

As I mentioned earlier, I went all in with the Aiper IrriSense 2, and having a fully automated irrigation system for less than $2000 seems like a great deal compared to rebuilding my in-ground system, but that value will ultimately depend on how long each unit lasts. I’m fully committed to using these for the foreseeable future, so make sure to check the pinned comment for any updates or follow-up videos.

As always, there are no sponsored reviews on this channel, but I do have links to both smart sprinklers below, and as always, I appreciate it when you use those links since as an Amazon Affiliate I do earn a small commission on the sale at no cost to you.

I’d also like to thank all of my awesome patrons over at Patreon for their continued support of my channel and if you’re interested in supporting my channel, please check out the links down in the description. If you enjoyed this video, please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel and as always, thanks for watching The Hook Up.