Could you elaborate a little for me? What should I do? Thanks!
If he switches to .35 pr heads you can shave off 23 minutes a zone.
right now i have it set to 1in/hr rotor and it runs for 37 mins. If I set it to .35in/hr custom rotor, it wants to run for 2+ hrs and I have 9 zones of rotors…
I don’t know about our area being considered ‘normal’, but to echo @plainsane 's point I have a PR or 0.4"/hr, root depth of 8" & AWC of 0.12. That gives me 8 * 0.12/0.4 = 2.4 hrs. With the 50% MAD and 0.8 efficiency, I water for 2.4hr*0.5/0.8 = 1.5 hours. If my PR were 0.3"/hr like his my time would be 2 hours. This, and my grass is hardly lush. Of course it’s a desert …
I would move up to the .5 heads will get you to 1 hour 35 minutes. Really it’s 1 hour 5 minutes but you will have a soak so another zone can run.
Your pr for the zone should be .3, don’t change that, the model will skew, this skew will continue to compound.
What I’m trying to tell you is that, your irrigation must run that long based on the data you have presented. You can sacrifice root qualit by shorter more frequent applications by artificially inflating your pr, but this is rarely desirable.
Take a,look at this guys post, he has pics of doing it wrong to doing it right, all on flex daily, living in satans butt crack Watering strategies to fix this bad area
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ok, keeping my pr at .3 for the 9 rotor zones still puts my watering time at around 18 hours. Im on a well and cant come close to that. whats the best alternative?
When I was choosing the default rotor of 1in/hr it would run for 37 minutes every 4-5 days. Once I found out my nozzles are really only putting out .3in/hr, I brought up this discussion
How long were you running that way ? How long have you had the Rachio and what was the watering like before ? I’m trying to understand what your lawn has been trained to see up to recently.
I got rachio at the beginning of this season. Last year I watered 30mins per day every day.
Did you measure your root depth ? If not, it may not be at 6" based on that schedule. How about your soil, where did you get the Loam setting and the 0.17 Available Water number ?
Haven’t measured root depth. Got the loam and the other setting from plainsane who looked it up for me.
So you’re in good shape for the soil settings if you got the numbers from @plainsane. @plainsane , I’m thinking maybe he moves to a 4" root depth, then tries to move deeper over time. It seems unlikely that he’s at 6" right now if he’s been running daily for 30 mins. Maybe MAD should start lower too with a goal to get to 50% over time. What do you think?
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Yea I agree, if the yard is burning drop your roots back to 4 then step it up an inch after 2 watering cycle, keep doing this until you are back to 6.
I wouldn’t move mad, just because it’s effect is already being adjusted by the root change.
You do have shallow roots, we need to get those deeper so it is more drought tolerant but most importantly to extract more nutrients from the frertz you put out.
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Ok. Got the custom Nozzle set up at .35in/hr and root to 4". Flex will be starting st 1am this morning and will run until around noon tomorrow. Gonna sit back and see how it goes. Thanks for you’re help everyone.
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If using published precipitation rates, make sure your zone is set up as defined. For the 0.3"/hr, this would be square watering pattern with 180° arcs, head to head coverage, 45psi. Is this correct? Did not see any info from @Dkd114 about number of heads in the zone, or their arc. Catch cup test would be a more accurate measure of precipitation rate.
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My yard is basically a square. I have 180 degree arches around the perimeter and three zones in the middle that each have three heads spinning 360 degrees. All provide head to head coverage. Each zone has 3 heads in the zone.
Even though this sketch is awful, all do provide head to head coverage and all are hunter pgp ultra rotors. Should settings be different between the center 360s and the outer 180s?
Great diagram! The center 360° would run at 0.15"/hr. Sorry, just added even more run time to your system! Is the distance between the heads 25-30 ft?
30’