Gotcha - Available Water is set at 0.17.
I think I’m going to have an irrigation company come out and look at my sprinklers, I think there’s too many in certain areas that overlap with each other. The pooling only happens in certain areas of the yard.
You can do that… or if you have time and the desire, you can run a catch cup test to determine how much water is placed into each zone and then you create custom nozzles instead of the default 1.5in/hr fix spray head. I did the catch cup test, real easy to do, and I created a different custom nozzle for my 3 zones. Zones 1 and 3 are similar but zones 2 gets a lot of water from both zones 1 and 3, so my custom nozzle for zone 2 is higher (like 2.5 in/hr) whereas my zones 1 and 3 are 1.3 and 1.8 respectively. Doing this then has my zone 2 run like half the amount of time that my other zones do, thus no over watering.
Great, thank you for your help. Will try it out.
I woke up again this morning to another pool, so I’m going to do the cup test. It doesn’t say what size cup test to use though.
Does it matter? I was just going to use red plastic party cups…
I thought about going the homemade route, but then I found it was just easier to buy these. They are clearly marked, give instructions, and when you plug the numbers into their website, it’ll give you precip rate and also efficiency, two things you’ll plug into Rachio.
Thanks, ordered them - will find out what they say tomorrow.
Cool, I think that is the best idea if you don’t mind doing the work yourself and saving some $ over having someone come out. How many different zones do you have?
I have 6 grass zones, 3 shrubs, and 3 plants.
Quick question if you don’t mind. Let me try to explain it.
Zone 1 and Zone 2 overlap for 2 of the 5 or so sprinklers. To get a accurate flow rate, would I keep the cup in zone 1 and run zone 1 for 20 minutes, and zone 2 for 20 minutes and then combine those numbers and use that as the flow rate for zone 1?
I can do that, but then it’s going to affect the other 3 sprinklers that don’t have that overlap. Thoughts?
That’s exactly what you do. I was just going to explain that to you but you have the concept down perfectly. For me, (as I mentioned above) my Zone 2 gets water from both Zone 1 and Zone 3, so I placed cups in zone 2, watered all 3 zones for 10 minutes each, then used that number for my Zone 2 calculations… thus that is why my zone 2 runs the least amount.
FYI, 20 minutes for each zone may be a bit overkill, so use your own judgement once you see how fast those cups fill up.
So I ran the test tonight. 6 of them… Each of them in ML for 5 minutes.
35
75
60
30
50
25
So, I added all those, divided by 6 * 20 which got me 916ml/hour. Google is telling me that is 55 inches/hour, which the app doesn’t like… What am I doing wrong here?
Yeah there is more to it than that. I tried to do the calc before too on my own, but you’ll want to use the orbit website, that makes it super simple. Unfortunately, they’ve been having errors on their website, see this post about the issue and also the short term resolution to enter in your numbers.
This is what I get when I put in my data, I don’t see anything about flow so I can’t tell what to put in for a custom nozzle.
Yeah they don’t do a good job of telling you but you click on the Station 1 name to see your numbers. Post up what the numbers say on the next page you see
Ahh, looks like they are still having problems… When I click on that, I get a blank page.
I used their iPhone app, says 2.06 in/hour… so I’ll dial that in and hope for better results!
Thanks so much for your help!
Cool, I think that sounds like a good PR if you are getting pooling with the other settings being correct. Like I may have mentioned before, my one zone that gets a lot of overlap is 2.2 and it waters the least amount and looks the best.
It did, it changed it to 20 minutes and with sloping, it created 4, 5 minute sessions. We shall see when it runs tomorrow…
btw how did this turn out? any less flooding?
