Anyone in the Gilbert area willing to help me out with some set-up? I installed my Rachio on my side year (independent of the main clock) to get a feel for the system and get everything set-up correctly before deploying to my main yard. I thought I had the drip side of it humming along pretty good until it got hot, for so long, with no measurable rain until this last week.
I had looked through a couple Arizona specific threads and got some really good information, some I understand, other information I don’t.
For one, I used the map that has been recommended time and time again to find my soil type, and it came back with clay loam. Most Arizona people are saying more sandy loam. Is this just in an attempt to fool Rachio a bit?
Also my side yard I am experimenting in is set up very similar to my main yard, just on a much smaller scale. I have a bush/shrub zone, a tree zone, and grass zones. Right now I have my drip zones set up like this:
Advance settings are as follows:
Shrubs
Area - 2 sq ft (Don’t fully understand what this should be, but the default 500 sq ft didn’t seem right)
Available Water - .12" (default setting)
Root Depth - 24" (think I changed this from reading I have done)
Allowed Depreciation - 50% (Default)
Efficiency - 70% (lowered it down from the 90% since the emitters aren’t ideally placed)
Crop Coefficient - 70% (pretty sure I read this somewhere)
Trees
Area - 9 sq ft (again, not really sure what this is or how to correctly calculate)
Available Water - .12" (default)
Root Depth - 24"
Allowed Depreciation - 50%
Efficiency - 70%
Crop Coefficient - 85% (think I changed this to get the run time to adjust to something more favorable)
I have my custom 2pgh emitters set up with a .40 in/hour PR.
My shrub zones have 2gph emitters, and depending on the size of the bush or shrub, smaller ones have 1, larger bushes can have 2. Trees also have 2gph emitters, but smaller trees have at least 3, larger trees might have as many as 5. Sadly, when multiple emitters are present, they are clustered near the trunk or base of the bush. I think I’m having some issues setting up the drip zones to water correctly based on the variance of emitters. Can anyone shed some light on this for me?
That will be a good start. I’ll chew through one thing at a time. I won’t get into the addition of citrus trees that we run on the same loop as the trees. Thankfully I have flood irrigation that can cover most of that…