I forgot to answer this. When you go through the Water Use It Wisely site it will give you a range of root depths for different vegetation types. You might need to use your judgement on where you lie in that range if you have varying levels of plant maturity and type. Keep in mind that setting deep roots tells the system to water longer and less frequently, so if you have less mature plants that might need more frequent watering you don’t necessarily want to pick the deepest estimated root depth in your zone.
Welcome to the forum, @njhaley. You’ll find a helpful bunch of desert rats here.
Xeriscape and drip systems and the unique characteristics of our desert adapted plants can be a bit mind-boggling at first, but once you get the controller set up, you may be surprised. I appreciated your comment about seeing water being wasted pouring into the streets.
@azdavidr has done his homework and his posts regarding drip irrigation are absolutely worth the read. @Modawg2k turned his lawn from one with a dead spot to beautiful green.
Since your landscape is well established you may find it requires little water. Desert plants have several adaptations that help them during prolonged droughts. Some have waxy leaves, some have no leaves at all and some drop their leaves when there is little water available.
Lantana, hesperaloe (red yucca) and succulents such as cacti and agave have fairly shallow root systems, but they do spread out to capture rain water when it’s available. A saguaro’s root system is not often more than 4 inches deep, but spreads out about as far as the cactus is tall.
Over-watering these plants may kill them, so flexible daily schedules are perfect for this situation. My xeriscaped front yard is well established and I don’t think that my hesperaloe even has an emitter any more.
Now if those waskly wabbits would stop munching on it!
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It’s important to identify soil type.
There’s quite a bit of research being done on drip irrigation. Soil wetting patterns are affected by soil density and application rate–generally the denser the soil, the more the water spreads laterally.
Increasing the application rate (as in 2 gph emitters) will increase the soil wetting pattern laterally. The studies show that reduced flow rate increases wetted soil depth and decreases the wetted width.
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I’m in anthem and having these same issues but loving the rachio so far. Thanks for the links.
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Thanks for everyone’s help so far. The soil type is most likely sandy loam based on a Mason jar test, but it doesn’t go much deeper that a foot before I hit the hard stuff.
I managed to get everything installed this morning in less than an hour, didn’t even have to run to home depot for supplies to finish the install!
I did visit this afternoon to pick up replacement drip nozzles so I’d know exactly how much was being emitted at each plant. We also picked up a bunch of new ornamentals for the front yard which will be incorporated into the small plant zone.
I know I’ll be able to get this sorted out, but I still think there are some pretty significant problems with the way the software and app work today. I’m a pretty smart person, so I can’t be the only one that doesn’t get this.
For example: why can you only put one emitter per zone? I can’t be the only one who has these things stacked up in series - either in the desert or anywhere really. Without doing a bunch of non-intuitive math, it’s a pain for the layperson to sort out easily. Even for an advanced lawn care expert this is non-intuitive… Instead I think the algorithms are something only a soil scientist or a turf manager could digest - not your everyday homeowner.
This brings up the more important point I think: how can you be certain how much water you’re using and therefore saving? We’ve got almost a dozen drips in our front yard - some 2gph, most 1gph, some 0.5gph. How can the software ever take all of those into account and accurately determine how much water was used without knowing each and every drip connected in series on the zone?
Again, I love the system, it was a breeze to install and I’d recommend it to anyone, but I think these missing pieces are a serious flaw in the app/user interface. Hopefully it’s something they address in a future overhaul…
i set up a custom emitter nozzle myself for my drip then realized it thought it was pushing 200 gallons an hour. i’m in the same boat as you at this point.
What was your emitter PR and about how many emitters do you figure that you have ?
The software determines the watering time based on how much water is put out by the emitters, and what the needs of your vegetation are in your given climate and soil. Since there is only one valve controlling your zone, it can only use one emitter type per zone (valve) to determine your watering time. Note that the emitter is intended to be representative of all of the emitters on your zone. In my case, I have single 1 GPH emitters on my shrubs, so I set my nozzle according to that case. For my trees, I have three 2 GPH drips on each of them, so my custom nozzle is representative of a single 6 GPH emitter per tree.
I guess I don’t really see this as a limitation of the software, as much as it is of the irrigation system design. Going back to my example of shrubs, I’m currently not optimally watering each of my shrubs. I have small shrubs and larger ones. My larger shrubs might require two 1 GPH emitters, whereas my smallest might be OK with one 1 GPH emitter. I would still be OK with having one run time for the entire zone. Say that I set up my schedule to run 5 hours in this configuration. My small shrubs would get 5 gallons of water and my larger shrubs would get 10. The larger shrub should be getting more water so it’s all good. This puts the onus of having a proper irrigation setup on the consumer, but of course that’s already the case, regardless of whether you have a ‘smart’ or ‘dumb’ controller.
Let me know if this makes sense, or if I might have missed part of your point. Glad to hear that your install went well!
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How were you scheduling your irrigation before?Just an observation: you have a mismatched zone with so many different gph outputs. If you must use these individual drippers, you should be using the same emitters throughout the zone. Are you connecting tubing directly from PVC pipe? I encourage replacing this type of microirrigation with drip tubing with inline, self-flushing, pressure compensating emitters. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DO5hTTNZHvRE&ved=0ahUKEwjezZOy_-POAhUG9GMKHaWQA0oQwqsBCB0wAA&usg=AFQjCNGJpqyhfOjl-Omj800ibyUMCAMLYg&sig2=44L_3kIRGKtHPcUsBtNFgw
Honestly I don’t know my system well enough yet. I’m still working on the grass. I can start a new thread for my issues just thought I’d chime in and say that grass seems a lot easier to configure than emitters.
That’s for sure! I hope you’ll find the post I reference above makes that process a bit easier. Since you live in the Phoenix metro area, you’ll benefit directly from the ‘Water Use It Wisely’ site that I reference in the emitter post. Let us know if you have any problems.
As @azdavidr has mentioned your concern is related to the zone itself, there really is nothing the controller can do to address a mismatch in watering needs on a single zone. I know the pain, one of my zones has all kinds of plant types with very different needs. There are ways to try to address this though. You should set your PR rate based on your most thirsty plants. The controller will then give you the run time needed for the plants. You can then use that run time to calculate the type of emitter you need for the rest of the plants by dividing the amount of gallons the plants need by the run time. Let’s take azdavid 's shrub example, for his larger shrubs he know he needs a run time of 5 hours with 2 gph emitters for his larger shrubs. For his smaller shrubs he only needs half the water so he chose 1 gph emitters and it works out. That’s what I plan on doing with my problematic zone once the heat let’s up
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That’s essentially what I’ve done by paying attention to what’s in the zone - cacti are on a 0.5gph, shrubs and ground cover on a 1gph, trees and new addition shrubs on 2gph, the issue is how can the software adequately keep track of usage - it seems like it’ll run the same now and tell me “x gallons” vs. if I add one or two or three additional 1gph emitters. How can we get it to accurately calculate how much water is being used?
I mean, I know what it is because I can add up all of my emitters and I know how long the program runs, seems like that’d be an easy add on to the app. I think they’ll have to come up with a new way to approach this problem for all the users with xeriscaping and drip systems - many of which are in drought/intensive water management areas…
@njhaley I agree that getting accurate water usage from single-point emitter systems is cumbersome. You can back calculate an ‘Area’ value to plug into your zone that will be fairly accurate, but when you add more plants you’ll need to update that value. I agree it would be easier to just add a number of emitters for that. If you want to back calculate an area to give you a better reflection of your water usage for that drip zone, here’s what I did.
By the way, you may face other challenges with your current irrigation setup if I understand it correctly. Do you have cacti, shrubs, ground cover and trees all on the same zone ? The different emitter rates are nice for throttling the amount of water delivered per watering, but that range of vegetation also has a vastly different set of needs for frequency. For example, the cacti would be much better off with less frequent watering. They may eventually have problems if they are watered as frequently as your shrubs and/or ground cover.
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I think I’ve got it pretty well sorted out - the trees are on one zone, the shrubs/ground cover etc on another. We’ve got two cactus on the shrub zone - one, a fence post with 0.5gph on the extreme edge of the root zone, and an ocotillo planted this weekend with a 1gph emitter. I expect we’ll cut that back to a 0.5gph emitter when summer is up.
If we need to, over the winter we can tap into that third zone wire and build out another zone, but I bet this’ll suffice.
For my area, I’ve done some rough estimates and punched in 100ft2 for the shrubs and 150ft2 for the trees. We’ll see how that goes…
Sounds like you’re pretty well set.
I’m guessing you already know this, but depending on how well established your cacti are and what’s nearby, you may not even need an emitter at some point. One of the healthiest plants I have is a cacti that my daughter randomly planted from a potted cacti that her aunt gave her. It was about 3 inches tall when she planted it two years ago. It’s 6.5’ tall and 6.5’ wide now. I never added an emitter, but you can see it has a couple of neighbors. I’m curious as to what PRs you ended up with for your custom emitter nozzles ?
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That is awesome. My drips are also all on 1 or 2 zones for trees shrubs and cacti. That makes it really tough. Anthem water bill was 260 last month.
I’ve been thinking about capping the fence post emitter. I had thought it was only a year or so since it was planted, but it’s got a new little dude poking out at the base so it may be pretty well established.
My PR is a generic 0.50, which I think makes sense based on your 0.16 calculation - I’m expecting my ground cover to require about a third as your shrubs. (2.5g required per plant)
I do have a bunch of bottle brush shrubs on it though, using 1gph emitters… I may bump those up to 2gph so they get a bit more water. I also have a few agaves on 0.5, and I hesitate to take them off completely since they all got pretty well singed this summer. We bought the house in May, and I don’t think the previous home owner had been watering much at all - I’ve spent the past couple months chasing down new leaks, it’s as if the previous irrigation system hadn’t been maintained at all. Hoses exposed everywhere, clogged drips, etc. The bottle brushes were also in rough shape, but they’re making a comeback.
Ah, a perfect time to spend fixing leaks is when it’s 110 F or more, not to mention moving in May. It’s going to be a chore, but I plan to do more of what you’ve been doing in the fall to get my shrub watering time down, and get better coverage of my roots with multiple emitters. Nice job getting all of this done in a weekend. It took me quite a while to get to the point where you are. I started with a simple fixed schedule until I had time to look into all of this. Even then it took a while. Let us know how things go over time for you.
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