Reclaimed water and changing schedules for available water
I live in a municipality that provides reclaimed water for irrigation. Its great when the water is available, but as we enter into drought periods combined with recent urban growth to our area that uses the same supply, my municipalilty will shut off the supply for multiple days a week and restrict the daily time window for supply. It gets really tricky to know when these restictions kick in. During these heavy restiction periods, we may get water 2 days a week from midnight to 4am. Yes it is possible to call a hotline and listen to a record message when a new schedule has been implemented, but honestly I dont think to do that till I notice some areas of my lawn looking bad. Question for rain machine team. Is there anyway I can use the input from a normally open/normally closed switch that is detecting pressure in my reclaimed water supply to help me with scheduling? For example, could I use the rain sensor input as a water supply available input? So lets say I have no water supply at the time program starts and the rain sensor input which is actually a supply input fakes the controller into thinking its raining. In which case, my default action is to snooze till next day. Maybe, you can think of some other potential solution. Would appreciate your thoughts!
Thanks,
Greg
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Hi Greg,
If you set snooze until next day, you might get stuck in a loop with no irrigation. If you have no reclaimed water during the hours your programs are set up to run, and it is possible to have reclaimed water supply for such limited times, (2 days a week, between 00:00-04:00) you could end up skipping irrigation all the time: your programs never run when water is there.
You can enable push notifications, so if there's a water outage you can learn about it fast from a notification on your phone. Of course, the device will report "rain detected" and/or "snooze", because of the input you used to connect your pressure sensor (rain sensor input).
Is this reclaimed water supply the only water source to your irrigation system?
Cheers,
Istvan
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Thank you for responding. To answer your question, yes, reclaimed water is the only water source for my irrigation system. In case you're thinking this, It's not feasible to merge a secondary source, and it's Florida code that drinking water, and reclaimed can NOT be mixed. In the end, our area, and I'm sure others that have reclaimed water, have some water restrictions that are dynamic, and forced on us by our municipality. Reclaimed water may be available 7 days a week from 00:00-11:00 for 8 months of the year. During the remaining 4 months, the municipality may step down supply availability to various sub-areas to meet demand requirements while not allowing their tanks to run dry. It's a complex, dynamic situation that I think you can imagine, but it's very unpredictable. Many of my neighbors during this highly restricted period, will simply setup there sprinklers to run every night, and if the water's on, they get it, if not not, they're setup to get it the following evening. As you can imagine, this is wasteful when the water restrictions are lifted. So basically, we have a 3rd factor in my sprinkler schedule in addition to 1) Weather, 2) Needs of our landscaping, we have a 3rd, which is "Is water available". Additionally, this is quite interesting, our pressure will drop significantly during this period, so the amount of water I get in 10 minutes can vary greatly from winter (no restrictions) to summer (highly restricted). I think in the end, maybe if the Rainmachine controller or a future generation of it has some type of flow monitor option on water source, then this could be managed better. For now, I'm thankful for the features my Rainmachine, and I thank the development team hardware, software and firmware for what they've provided. It's so much better, that my 2001 RainBird controller with the faulty backup battery, and push button setup.
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Hello Greg,
If you know you will get the water regularily (to some degree), then what you said in your first post is the best option to go with: fool the controller into thinking it's raining, and snooze until next day.
Another option is to select resume instead of snooze and have watering start as soon as there's water available. But, as watering in the morning or evening is more efficient, this option isn't that great. There is also a risk of getting sprayed while walking around your yard, as you say these transitions from "water unavailable" to "water available" are unpredictable.
We are looking into flow measuring solutions.
Thank you for your interest and your helpful suggestions.
Istvan
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