Advanced zone setup question

I was a Gen1 owner and recently upgraded to gen3 due to needing more zones. I’d like to take advantage of the flex scheduling, but my default zone settings were way out of whack. I’ve been playing with them over the past day, and I think I have them dialed in well, but the one piece that’s throwing me off is the nozzle inches per hour.

My main lawn zones have rainbird 5000 heads. I have the product spec sheets that show precip in/hr, for a square or triangle setup at various psi and models. What I’m not sure of, is the number shown in the table the amount per head, or the amount expected across the setup? (ex, for my head it shows 0.28"/hr @ 45psi for a 1 gallon/hr head). Do I fill in 0.28 in the advanced zone settings, or 0.84 because there are three heads in that zone?

I also have the rainbird 5000 the nozzle for the series are .51- .75” per hour, but I haven’t done a catch cup test yet so I choose 0.61 in the middle for until I do a catch cup.

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I have the low angle heads, with a mix of 1.0 & 2.0 gallons/hour. I was using this chart for reference https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.rainbird.com/sites/default/files/media/documents/2018-02/ts_5000Series.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjkjMzRpevbAhWD6oMKHTj9DP8QFjAAegQIABAB&usg=AOvVaw3fsGQC6WSMnnxGNzxHZokW

These are the shart the am using for mine image

If there’s overlap you’ll want to add rates. But there are a lot of variables at play so a simple catch cup test is the best way to know.

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If you haven’t done a catch cup test I’ll probably go for somewhere in the middle of that 0.43-0.51” since you only have three heads in the zone?

I did a rain cup test in each of my lawn zones this morning. For the lawn zones, the cup test and values in the zone settings make sense when looking at the flex scheduling times. What threw me off though was the tree lawn and side zones where there’s no overlap and the heads are in a straight line. The cup also had difficulty catching the water due to the head. Playing with the numbers and the estimated times the flex schedule was putting out, it looks like heads x rate is what it needs to cover the area (so tree lawn is 2.48"/hr, so it looks like it’ll run for 8 minutes per run, which is about right. If I do a half inch, it wants to run for nearly two hours!).

If you change your nozzle to 0.28 or 0.44” inch/hr what does flex daily schedule say it want to run for ?

If I change it from 1.64 to 0.41, it goes from 9 to 38 minutes

Can you post your zones setting to peak at ?

This particular zone has 4 hunter mp 1000 heads. Two at 90 degree outputs, two at 180

Ok cool season grass root depth is 6 inc the AWC for clay loam is 20 the efficiency I’ll dial back 70 do know for sure clay loam is your soil type?

For reference I have cool season grass my AWC is 15 my soil type is sandy loam I started flex daily with one first that seems to be really and am going to apply the setting to the rest of my zones.

I’ll play around. It’s certainly Clay loam - probably even closer to clay. We have crappy soil here.

My grass roots aren’t very deep. I just had a bunch cut out to make way for some new landscaping, and they only had the sod cutter art to 2". It’s a mix of blue grass & rye

I’ll change the nozzle to 0.41” inc/hr and start with one zone first on flexible daily schedule try it for few weeks and if you see that the grass is happy apply it to rest of the zones in the meantime leave the others zones on a fixed schedule.