Cycle/Soak Times
Just a thought on a product enhancement. Your current set up for C/S is set to allow No watering activity during the soak time on any of the zones. This is essentially dead time increasing the length of the program.
Would it not be wise to allow other zones to water during the soaking times of previous zones? Just a thought as in our area we have watering restrictions per day and time.
Say that I want to water my 8 zones. Each zone has a run time of 45 minutes. That would come to 6 hours of watering. I am not allowed to water between the hours of 10am and 6pm in non summer months and no watering between 9am and 8pm during the summer months. SO, just to run my non C/S schedule during the non summer months I would have to start my watering at 4am and at 3am for summer months. With the current setup of C/S it could take 12+ hours to C/S the yard. I am restricted to 2 days a week for watering year round. Non summer months the current setup is fine and wont cause an issue with getting hit with a fine. Summer months is another story.
I just would love to do C/S so the run off is minimized or negated completely. I know I can make multiple schedules to minimize my C/S down time, but why not make it easier instead of making customers run multiple schedules to do this?
just a thought.
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John,
On option you may or may not have tried would be setting the C/S to automatic and then letting it run once.
After its run you can go back and check the Water History and see if the system was able to better manage the time while soaking.
If not another option until we have more flexible programing would be to setup a program for each cycle.
Hence program 1 would run each zone for the first cycle , then the 2nd program would run the 2nd cycle, eliminating any down time.
Let me know if you have any feelings on this.
Brandon
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John,
On option you may or may not have tried would be setting the C/S to automatic and then letting it run once.
After its run you can go back and check the Water History and see if the system was able to better manage the time while soaking.I did try that and it was a crazy amount of time. Granted in my example above I said 45m of run time per zone. This time of the year I apply a total of .25" of water per week or about 12m of run time per zone with popups and 24 min per zone with rotors. Total run time for my setup without C/S was 1 hour and 6 min. When I tried the Automated C/S it turned my run time into 3h24m. That is crazy. If I had to apply 1" of water per week I would be looking at 4 hours without C/S and over 16 hours with C/S in automated CS mode.
If not another option until we have more flexible programing would be to setup a program for each cycle.
Hence program 1 would run each zone for the first cycle , then the 2nd program would run the 2nd cycle, eliminating any down time.
Let me know if you have any feelings on this.
Brandon
While this is an option, I would need to set up multiple 0.25" programs to start at differing times, if I am not mistaken. Either way I would have to calculate the end times of the other programs to config the starting of the other programs...correct? I am trying to eliminate as much of my time in front of my controller/computer that I can with this. I was already doing this on my old controller (rainbird) and frankly dont want to do it. I want to make it as easy as possible on myself, or even my wife when I am not here to just log in and click the program we want to run for the week(unless we can get a better setup to calculate run times based on soil, lawn type, weather conditions, pET data...I have the other thread in another area covering this)
I know I am asking for a lot here and I may just start another thread in this area for some other suggestions to address them instead of changing the subject on this one.
Maybe there would be a better way to get the C/S and zones running to eliminate down times of the system itself. Basically what I am looking for is as follows and would vary on everyones setup....so my numbers would be just a base example.
My Zone run times for 0.25" of water
Zones 1 - 3 and Zones 6 - 8 run a total of 12 minutes
Zones 4 & 5 run a total of 24 minutes
So with that said running zone 1 for 6 min..move to zone 2 for 6 minutes to allow soaking of zone 1. Move back to zone 1 to finish 6 minute cycle. When done move to Zone 2 again to do 6min cycle. Then zone 3 for 6m then zone 4 for 12m, back to zone 3 for 6m cycle then zone 5 for 12m, back to zone 4 for 12m, then zone 5 for 12m, then zone 6 for 6m, zone 7 for 6m, back to zone 6 for 6m then zone 7 for 6m then zone 8 for 6m and soak for 6 then spray for another 6.
Total run time for all zones comes to 2h6m compared to the automated of 3h24m with the current automated setup. Now these numbers only represent my systems C/S times and proposed C/S times for 0.25" imagine the time savings for greater amounts. It will allow those of us with strict watering times to be able to stuff a proper C/S in there and effectively have less run off.
Just some food for thought. I know I probably could have laid out the operation better, but Im limited to how it is laid out while using my phone in this response.
John
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