Hello all! I’m looking to get a controller for my garden area. So I figured I’d ask some questions here before I make the leap. I am in the hot desert of AZ. What I was wondering is if it is possible to set up scheduling to always open a line purge valve before opening the actual watering valves? The reasoning is i have a temporary line ran with filtration to the garden area. The water out of the tap alone can reach decently high temps but the water left in the main line can reach easily 130°+ and im guessing it’ll be much higher. Before a watering valve is opened I want the “purge valve” to open (pre filtration) for about 1 minute to clear the line of potentially very hot water before it passes through the filters on to the plants. Is this even possible?
Another question is, is it possible to program a valve to open based on temp as a trigger, then have it run a cycle program? The reasoning is again the high temps. I will have a ring of misters around the garden and I want them to turn on when it reaches 99°ish, then run in a cycle of say 3 min on 5min off untill the temp gets below the threshold. Additionally it would be nice to be able to “manually” turn on a valve from the app to turn on the misters for the patio when we are occupying it.
For any of those that are versed in the manual options of their unit it would be great to hear what options this has.
Thank you in advance!
You can kind of shoe horn it in as long as it is attached to the controller as a standard valve.
but it will be less than ideal. With water as needed you will wrestle with zone settings to have it run 1 minute only without causing this purge zone to trip your schedule daily.
With flex, I honestly think that is zone will trip daily as well, but only the zones that need to be run will run so you will purge daily.
You can sort of do this with IFTT integration. I use the “Lawn Toasty” recipe to run a normally disabled schedule if the “current temperature” is over 90 degrees. I would prefer to “anticipate” the temperature and enable a schedule, but last I looked that was not possible. (Haven’t checked recently since this is a summer time issue for me.)
I also live in the Phoenix area. It may depend on how you are delivering the water. For example I use drip, and so the water goes first on the ground and then begins to soak into the soil and it is a while before it reaches the roots. So as a result it would have cooled and I have never had issues. Since you are using misters then the very hot water goes directly to the leaves. I think most people in Phoenix try to avoid the spray as it loses a lot to evaporation and is not a very efficient method anyway.
another thought - all of my feeder lines are black, but they are nearly all buried under ground so that they don’t get the brunt of the direct sun. This would reduce the temperature of any residual left in the line but also protect the pipe from the high UV load which will deteriorate most plastic fairly quickly here in the desert.
Just a couple of thoughts.