Pressure

We recently got a sprinkler system for our house, so I was wondering how it works. Of course, I thought, there must be physics involved. So then came the idea for my blog: to find out how our sprinkler system works. After a whole year of physics, I was able to deduce that the water is pumped to the sprinklers under pressure, and I was right. Sprinkler systems uses jet pumps to get the water from a source to the sprinkler heads. The pump pushes the water up from the ground through the underground pipes. Sounds a lot like what we learned in physics about pressure. Pressure is equal to force over area, and since the area of a sprinkler system doesn’t change, the force has to be increased to increase the pressure and get water flowing. I’m glad that pressure is able to water our yard but now I’m thinking that we need it to tell us when it will rain so that our sprinkler system doesn’t go off when it is raining. Speaking of pressure, I think we need a barometer! Barometers measure atmospheric pressure, the pressure created by the weight in the atmosphere. Therefore, a barometer could probably tell us when it will rain because there will be more pressure in the atmosphere.