Mini-8 Total Watering Time Excessive-Part II
I received some suggestions in an earlier thread, but still find the suggested time to be way out of line.
The schedule is to start for the season 1 May, and I'm concerned. I'll run a catch cup tomorrow to ensure the PR is not way off, it's at 0.5 in/hr now.
Thing is, in the NE, we wouldn't use this amount of water in the 'heat' of Summer. When I had my manual timer, I scheduled these zone for 30 min (15min x2 day) every other day in hot weather, and 20 min every three days in normal weather.
Here's what the Mini-8 says on Zone 1 edit page:
Suggested daily summer watering time
Not scheduled, suggested by EPA WaterSense
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Here's what I see in Program page: TOTAL WATERING TIME |
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1. Front Yard
1hrs 6min 15sec |
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2. Side Yard
1hrs 6min 15sec |
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3. Back Yard
58min 27sec |
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4. Left Side Yard
1hrs 6min 15sec |
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Hi,
22 minutes is the daily duration for a summer day. This will increase with a lower frequency, for 1 hour and 6 mins it means an every 3 days watering cycle (3 * 22) which is the 100% duration that gets reduced by climate and rain. In the end we compute evapotranspiration based on a well tested and certified formula and then we replenish that in a duration based on the performance of the sprinklers.
If you think that suggested duration is too high you can use your previous system duration as a custom duration on each zone as a baseline for RainMachine future computations.
Basically what are you telling RainMachine with these duration is: "In a normal summer day my zone is fine if it's watered X minutes every Y days". Then RainMachine will take it from here.
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Excellent explanation of how and why.
This should be somewhere in the manual/info/settings pages.
Thank you. I will allow the timer to do the job I bought it for and monitor to see just how much water it uses before making manual adjustments.
So, just so I understand the process.
Currently, the program is showing the duration for the hottest, driest Summer day.
In May, when we would water every 3 days at 70% water budget, the timer should decrease the amount of water applied. Will it schedule accordingly, meaning skip days?
June (80%), July (90%), August (70%) every 2 days.
Then our last watering month, Sep (80%) every 3 days.That is how I manually would water which involved changing the manual timer monthly. I've left rain out of the mix as my rain sensor used to account for that and now the Mini-8 has access to rainfall amounts to better adjust.
When will the Mini-8 show the actual time/duration it intends to water?
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> Currently, the program is showing the duration for the hottest, driest Summer day.
Not exactly, it shows the duration on a "normal" summer day. There might be days when the weather is hotter/drier than your location baseline. You can see this baseline in web interface > Settings > Weather > ET.
The rest of your logic is correct.
The actual watering durations will be shown after you create a program and weather has been retrieved. It will nicely show those bar graphs with percentages.
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