Zone times very high
This is my first time programming and my water times per zone are very high. My 1 lawn area zone says it is going to water for 1hrs 15min 32sec. I think I am doing something wrong. Please help.
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Official comment
Hi Sean,
The suggested watering times are influenced by: Vegetation, Sprinkler Head type and Exposure to sun. In your case I believe it's the sprinkler head.
Can you let us know what sprinkler head type you use in zone properties ? For example our predefined Rotors have the precipitation at the bottom of the chart for this type of sprinkler (0.35 inches/hour) but there are rotors that can output up to 1 inch/hour. You can define a custom sprinkler head with a precipitation rate higher.
See this article for more information:
https://support.rainmachine.com/hc/en-us/articles/228001328-Sprinkler-Head-Types
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I agree. Something just doesn't feel right. I just discovered this feature 2 days ago and my programming is to water every 3 days per program. I have 3 programs - Front Yard, Back Yard, and Side Yard. Each program has 2 zones - top / bottom, although the side yard program is left / right. Without accounting for weather, it wants to water - all together, my zones for 35 hours a week. There's no way I can allow for that. I tried it for one day - today, and it watered my front yard for 268 minutes. I felt sick.
Although I understand there are many variables, it also rained 0.14 inches today, and the high was 63 degrees (although it was in the lower to mid-70s past week with a day in the low 80s).
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I am having the same issue with the latest code. Is this a bug? If I change head and or soil types it will reduce the time but some zones are still estimating over an hour. I am assuming that its because I am not watering every day but only 3 days a week. Are there plans to change the calculation to account for reduced days of watering?
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I found that if you have each program set to water on specific days, the days that are not watered are added to the days that are watered. This is what I was told on this forum because I had the exact same thing happen.
IF you say every day for the zones and set a GLOBAL restriction to only water on specific days/odd-even/etc., the ZONE watering time doesn't change.... strange that using the restrictions like that don't change the watering times.
And I was having a total watering time of over 12 HOURS where it should have been 1 to 2 hours total.
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I believe the issue here is that the precipitation rate assumes that only 1 and maybe 2 heads cover a certain area. Rainmachine has no way of knowing if your rotors overlap with 1, 2 or 3 rotors. Typical systems probably have quite a bit of excess coverage. Sounds like if you really want to get this value right you need to measure the rate with cups in your lawn.
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True. The only way for RM to accurately know how much water is actually being delivered is to use the catch cup method.
I plan on using some cheap food containers from the 0.99 cent store, scattering them around and measuring the amount collected with a calibrated syringe. That way, I don't have to worry about the cups having straight edges and measuring the amount in the cups, but rather dump each cup into a calibrated container.
I can even weight down the cups with a small rock that won't affect the amount of water collected. (AND the cup kits are around $2 PER CUP!). Kinda pricey for something that you only use once or twice!
I have the same situation where two of my rotors overlap a bit, since watering a square area with rotors that water a circular arc doesn't work too well.
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