AZ Drip Irrigation

I’m trying to get my drip system going, and having issues. Grass is great, but my trees and shrubs are wilting. I used to water 15 minutes a day, I know it was wrong, but it kept them alive. Can I have some help? How do I adjust this so that it actually waters them instead of me setting a manual run? I bumped the available water from .14 to .2 hoping it would make it water sooner, but it has not. I ran it last night for 20 minutes just because everything is turning brown, so that is the water you see in the chart.

First, you need to define wheat type of emitter you have. If you don’t know what you have, can you take a picture of one of your emitters and maybe we can point you in the right direction. The emitter you have selected is the “out of the box” emitter in Rachio and probably isn’t correct. You will need to create a custom emitter.

Otherwise, what does your landscaping consist of? Is it really xeriscape? Where are you located? You probably have sandy loam in the valley.

@Isriam Take a look at this guide to see if it helps.

Drip Emitter Calculator for Precipitation Rate & Area

2 Likes

thanks, i figured it was gonna take another week to do testing and setting it up :slight_smile: at this point just a manual run is probably best until i finish completely?

1 Like

For me, with drip emitters on landscape plants, the biggest impact is the nozzle that you choose. For the most part I have single emitters for each plant. Using the info that @azdavidr posted, I ended up changing my to a custom nozzle of .2 in/hr and I’m now very happy with the watering time.

@Linn I have single emitters on most of my plants also. What GPH do you have?

Most of mine are 1 GPH – the plants that have higher needs (my hydrangeas) have 2 GPH emitters, and two on each plant, (that is only so setting it up for all the 1 GPH emitters seems to work pretty well. (I have 12 hydrangeas, and then somewhere around 150-160 other plants - Sure doesn’t seem that much when you look at it!)