Hi, I have my new Iro and i’m trying to put in place some best practice on how many times and for how long i need to water my zones.
Let me give you a brief description of my scenario here…
I have 4 zones. 2 of them are focused on flower beds and have a specific picture of a dripper (red one) and have some mixed trees, lemon, mango, papaya etc.
the 2 other zones are a mix of grass and date palm trees. each zone gets 3 date palm trees and an area of grass making a total of 6 date palm trees and a patch of grass. in general 100 sqm.
For the grass i have a specific sprinkler (pictrue below) and for the palm trees i have another. the sprinklers are fixed and i believe the amount of water is the same (no option to change) and for the palm trees i have an option to open more or less. not sure if the amount of water changes or just the pressure.
Everything in the soil is sand.
When i program the irrigation schedules on the Iro it suggests me LONG Times per zone and before i was using rates or 3-5 minutes and 3 times a day.
as a reference, i live in Dubai and i’m using the weather station of the airport (17km distance) and it doesn’t rain here ever… (5 days a year)
I want to check if this is a good way (different) to do irrigation or if i should program manually to the 3-5 minutes which i used to use before when i have an old system.
Man, I honestly have no clue. I water for long periods with less frequency but I have a moisture barrier in place (mulch). I’m thinking with low humidity, sand and heat, that might not be a good pratice.
What type of grass? The tiller canopy will most likely act as a moisture barrier so that would be best served with a long watering period but I would need to know the grass type to be certain.
@gustfuchs, thanks for the details about your zones. Since you have mixed zones (multiple vegetation types and/or nozzle types within the same zone), it is difficult for the Iro to calculate the soil moisture reservoir, which is used in conjunction with the nozzle type to calculate the watering duration.
I don’t believe the photo of the grass nozzle attached; do you know if it’s a fixed spray head or rotor head? The palm trees are using bubblers, which can be opened or closed to control the output volume.
Do you know the vegetation type you selected? Trees have the deepest default root zone depth; combined with bubbler nozzles the durations will be long since the soil moisture reservoir is large but the fill rate is slow – like filling a swimming pool with a garden hose.
The Iro will recommend longer, infrequent waterings to promote deeper root growth. Short, frequent waterings usually promote shallow roots. Out of curiosity, do you have water restrictions in your area that recommend shorter watering durations?
Hi @gustfuchs, just to clarify, these are the settings for your two lawn zones, correct? (zones 2 & 4). It looks like your bed zones (zones 1 & 3) are setup with trees as the vegetation, which have a much deeper root zone depth (25 inches vs 9 inches). Do you think these depths correctly represent your yard? From the photos provided, it looks like you might be trying to grow seed on the turf zone(s) – if so, we’ll need to setup an establishment schedule, which is very different than a normal watering schedule.
Let me now on the seed questions above. The Iro will make watering durations based on the information provided to it. The better the data, the better the decisions it can make; i.e. how long and how often to water your lawn. Do you happen to know the type of grass seed you have?
