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We are using pressurized irrigation, are at the end of a line, and seem to keep running into issues. It seems I clean my filter at least once a month (sometimes more). A little over a month ago, the grass seemed to suddenly turn brown (reality is I was not checking it). I starting to figure out what was going on and I started blaming all sorts of things.
This past Saturday, I was digging to split a zone and found no grubs, webworms, or other insects. I went to turn on a zone to make sure I had visual on heads, but found no pressure. Oh no, I think I found the problem. I cleaned the filter and same thing. Grabbed a pressure gauge and found the pressure was quite low. I took out the filter, found I needed to clean the filter again, but measured the pressure without the filter and it was still low.
I called the city and asked that they check the city filter. They replaced the meter as they were thinking it was having issues. When I measured it after that, no change. I called the city back and they said they would talk to another city person about the filter. I happened to run some water yesterday morning, visibly noticed low pressure and did the same thing this morning, noticing higher pressure. The sprinklers are working once again. So, I started today by emptying the soil moisture, which I will probably make sure I get it to 100% and repeat for a few days. I really hope to get it to recover before the grass hibernates.
I was thinking I need to get an inline pressure gauge so I can monitor and catch these kind of issues early. I have not found any online and ask a sprinkler place this morning. They said to use a flow meter and set each zone to a range and they notify when the flow goes either over or below the range while shutting off the system. At least this was a Hunter Flow Sensor (or whatever it is called) on a Hunter Controller. My questions are:
- Does Rachio has a similar integration with various flow sensors, not only indicating a potential leak, but also potentially restricted water flow? It appears I can set the low-flow and high-flow triggers (as a percentage), plus auto shut off on high flow.
- Does Rachio show a history of the flow per zone?
- What is the best Rachio integrated and overall best flow meter?
- I am not sure I have a preference between wired and wireless (both seem to have advantages and disadvantages). Curious about thoughts?
- With how much organic matter I seem to get, will the sensor restrict flow or require cleaning on anything?
- How does the integration work on a water feature that has mechanical auto-fill, but can electronically turn on the actual feature through Rachio? I believe most of the time, the filling happens during and after it is electronically turned on, but do not know how to tell about any other times.
- So, I would guess it would cause a trigger if it were filling when a zone was on.
- I would also guess it is possible to cause a trigger if none of the zones were on while it was filling. However, it seems like I heard that Rachio does not detect this type of thing?
- I just had an interesting thought . . . the new meter is a Sensus water meter, which just might be a smart meter. I found I can look more at aggregate amounts, but not sure about real-time. I doubt that Rachio integrates with this kind of thing, but that would be awesome. Does it?