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Chris

March 27, 2017 13:55

I filled in all the details of my lawn and zones accurately.  I understand that the suggest time is the EPA suggested time based on my details but this number is ridiculously high.  Last summer with my old controller I watered each zone for 15 minutes 3 times a week and did great.  With my new RainMachine it's suggested I water each zone for 57 minutes!  What's going on?  I bought this to help make watering decisions based on the environment and weather but this seems way off.  In the middle of summer will I be watering for 8 hours a day?

Moving past those issues I set my suggested time at 20% of the crazy high number.  When I do that and look at my program timer the time has doubled.  If zone one is going to be 12m 22s, on the program screen it shows 37m 08s. And with just this one zone configured my total watering time is 37m 08s.  What am I doing wrong?

 

Current details of program:

Weather-adaptive watering is on

Start Time 05:30

Frequency Mon, Thurs

Cycle Soal - Auto

Delay between zones - Off

Rain Restriction - Off

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• Official comment

  

  RainMachine Nicholas March 28, 2017 06:25

  Hi Chris,

  If you have previous experience with watering time for your zones, I would just use the "Custom" duration instead of "Suggested" which needs more fine tuning.

  Sprinkler head, vegetation and sun exposure settings impact the watering times in descending order (sprinkler head is the most important). For example our predefined rotors have a low precipitation rate (0.35 inches/hour) but there are rotors with 1 inch or more almost 3 times less time. You can configure a custom sprinkler head and try to determine correct precipitation rate maybe using a catch cup test. See here for more information: https://support.rainmachine.com/hc/en-us/articles/228001328-Sprinkler-Head-Types

  Also the "Vegetation" type could be improved our generic "Lawn" setting has a quite high coefficient (0.8) which depending on your grass type could be lowered to 0.6 for a warm season grass (bermudagrass, zoysiagrass, or St. Augustinegrass). This can also be set as a "Custom" and it's an area which will be improved in the future with more predefined settings.

  https://support.rainmachine.com/hc/en-us/articles/230297908-Vegetation-Types

  As for the difference in zone suggested *daily* duration vs program zone duration it's because on zones we show a daily amount (based on EPA algorithm) and in the program if it's not daily the duration increases with the number of missing days between watering events (a "every 2 days" program will show double the amount from your zone suggested duration).

   

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