False Positives on wireless flow meter and drip lines

[ukinne]

I have installed a wireless flow meter as part of a new install of an irrigation system.
I received high flow/leak alerts for the zone that contained drip lines.
I was unable to identify any leakage in the zone, so I re-calibrated and it appears to be working OK.
Is it normal for a new drip line installation to vary by over 10% flow in the first week of installation.
That kind of variance seems probable as the system beds in, but wanted to get folks’ opinion.

Thanks

N

[azdavidr]

I do think the default of 10% is too low for drip. Here’s how I initially picked a threshold.

Flow Meter Auto Shut Off (DRIP)

I decided to play around with the Auto Shut Off feature today. My baseline flow is 0.7gpm. I popped off one head and calibrated to see what the reported flow was, and that was 1.3gpm. I then set my High-Flow Trigger to 145% (1.02gpm) and enabled the auto-shut off. The video shows the resulting shut off at about 30 seconds in. It takes a couple of minutes to empty out the line, as this is the lowest spot in my yard, so I sped up the video starting at the 1 minute mark. For some reason the …

I haven’t had any false triggers, but believe it or not I caught a real leak! I think a rabbit or some other animal chewed threw the line. I might drop that 145% down a little bit at a time to see when I start getting false triggers, but for now I’m happy with the way it works!

Leak detected today (DRIP)

My trees were due to run today and I saw this message on my screen this morning: [leak_detected_msg] I’d just installed and calibrated my flow meter a couple of weeks ago, so sorry to say but I was questioning whether or not it was real. My tree drip line had previously calibrated to 0.7GPM, very close to the low limit (0.5GPM) of the flow sensor’s range. The high is 115F here today and my flow sensor is in the direct sun in the mornings, so I was wondering if the heat was throwing the accur…

[ukinne]

Very helpful, thank you very much.
Do you believe that the 10% variance is appropriate for sprays?
N

[franz]

@ukinne You might also want to try re-calibrating with a higher pressurize time which might help dial things in better.

Rachio High Flow Alerts

Ok, I reran all the zones in calibration using 2 minutes instead of 1 minute. Although visually I couldn’t see a difference in the strength of flow from the sprinkler heads there was a significant difference in the calibrated value. ALL of my 8 zones registered higher flow rates. In all it was an increase of 3.5%, 5%, 6%, 6%, 6%, 7%, 9%, and 9.5%. You can see with these higher values I was in several cases very, very close to the +10% warning margin the system defaults to when nothing was actual…

[ukinne]

Thanks, I will try that

[azdavidr]

@ukinne

Do you believe that the 10% variance is appropriate for sprays?

For my grass I’m set to 110% and that seems to be working fine. As @franz mentioned, using a higher pressurization time might help as well. I have mine set to 10 minutes, which is probably much higher than it needs to be. However, just from walking around the yard when I turn on the drip I know it takes a while for my drip flow to stabilize.