AcuRite 5-inch Magnifying Rain Gauge Review

Our Verdict

Every watering guide on the internet, including ours, says a lawn wants roughly an inch of water a week. Almost nobody knows what an inch looks like, and almost nobody subtracts what the sky already delivered. Five dollars fixes both. Leave it staked in the lawn and you can see at a glance whether Tuesday's storm counted as a watering or not, which is the single most common reason lawns get watered twice and lawns get watered never. It doubles as a catch can — set it inside the sprinkler pattern, run a cycle, and read the output directly instead of doing arithmetic with tuna tins. The magnified scale is the reason to pick this one over a plain tube: an inch mark you can read from standing height is a mark you will actually use. Bring it in before a hard freeze, because water expanding in acrylic is how these crack.