Dont get me wrong. Now that I have gone with a Wi-Fi smart controller I wont go back. When I decided to upgrade I was merely looking for a controller that allowed me to remote control it via Wi-Fi and rain skip. Other features were just icing on the cake. With rachio being able to connect to the weather station and to adjust water schedules dynamically, thats awesome. However to use its benefits fully is an excercise of frustration. If it was easy, I wouldnt be on this forum.
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Sorry for the delay. Work got hectic and my phone stopped working, finally got the app downloaded to the iPad. My front lawn has roughly 1216sq feet.
If that is the zone that is putting down 1.25"/hour for Nozzle Inches per hour, that would result in 15.8 gpm being required (1216 sq ft x 144 sq in/sq ft x 1.25"/min / 231 cu in/gal / 60 min/hr). That might be about right (mine are no higher than 12.5, but might be undersize). If you can read your meter while the zone is running, and measure gallons used over XX minutes, you can confirm that. If possible, it’s good to do that to as many zones as possible, to confirm your Inches/Hour for Nozzles.
That zone nozzle was at .7
Ok. I will try and get a gauge purchased today
No need to. Just take a reading from your water meter, run the zone for XX minutes (record minutes), then take another water meter reading to get actual water usage. From that you can calculate accurate average water applied over the zone.
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Looks like the KC meters don’t have readable numbers. Screen is blank lol. Stupid wireless reading system. Have to do the old rain gauge thing I suppose
@waderobinson The display on many of the newer water meters is powered by a solar panel and is blank in order to save power. For many of the meters you need to shine a light - sunlight or flashlight to activate the display. The display will then cycle through a variety of information. Check out your water district online and they will might have instructions on how to read the meter.
Below is a link to the instructions for my water district on reading their meters.
Thanks!
As @waderobinson said, plus when we went to digital, remote readouts here, they left the manual meter readout, but also they have an excellent online site that can read to the fractional gallon and reads in 15 minute increments. So you could run a zone, wait a while to separate it to the next time interval, then run another one. Pretty neat, actually, it even has settable leak detection. Anyhow, maybe your company has that available as well.
Hey Rraisley,
Ok. Been swamped around her lately. So I just ran the one zone and I started with the number 010.032.529 (says cubic feet/GPM). I ran the zone for 10 minutes and the meter reading afterwards was 010.039.218.
Yard is roughly 1216 sq ft. I’m not sure how to read the meter. Not sure if that number is gallons or what. There’s only a 6.6 difference between the two reasons, so I don’t know of that is 6.6 gallons used or cubic feet.
Okay, let’s see: 6.689 “somethings” in 10 minutes is 40.134 “somethings” per hour or 0.6689 “somethings” per minute. There are 1728/231 = 7.4805 gallons per cubic foot. Multiplying 7.4805 x 0.6689 = 5.004 gallons per minute. Not a completely unreasonable figure, although pretty low to my mind. My zones, which do NOT run high, run 10.6 to 12.5 gpm.
IF we assume that you’re putting out 5 gpm or 300 gph over 1216 square feet, that would calculate out to an applied inches per hour of 300 x 231 / 1216 / 144 = 0.396 "/hr or about 0.4 inches per hour. That’s actually in line with some of my zones; they’re just bigger.
Obviously, I’ve made some assumptions here, but if they’re correct, then changing your nozzle inches per hour to 0.4, rather than the 0.61 to 0.7 you’ve been using, will give you significantly more watering time than you are currently getting.
I think there’s a good chance the calculations are correct, because if they’re not, they’d be off by a factor of 10 (not sure about meter decimal point location) or 7.48 (reading in gallons instead of cubic feet). Both would seem to result in an unrealistic nozzle value.
So do you recommend I lower to .4 or just leave it at .61? I need to put 1.25” down each week for the new seed.
Well, 0.4 will put down about 50% more water than 0.61. Does that sound about right? For new seed, it’s better to err on the side of more water.
How are you handling the fact that new seed will want watered every day, probably more than once? A normal Flex Daily schedule will not do that, as it’s not designed for new seed.
I’m planned on running a daily schedule. My lawn guy said every day after 4am. So going to do it once a day, each day. So if I figured right, I’d need to run it about 25/26 minutes a day if I leave it at .61. 3 hours/180mins will get me to 1.2/1.25 inches a week.
If by Daily you mean Flex Daily, that will be difficult to get to do what you want. If you mean a Fixed schedule, set to run daily, that would work. Personally, I’d like to see you water at least once or twice during the heat of the day. A 4 AM watering will soak the dirt well, but I’m afraid the seed at the top is going to dry out. I’m also a bit concerned that 25 minutes of steady watering may wash some seed away, or cover it too much. Just my thoughts; it’s been over 50 years since I’ve planted grass, so may want someone else’s input here. Several who have been posting are trying to start new lawns, either seed or sod.
I’m not seeding a new lawn. I have a pretty good yard. sod is a year old. Just working on filling in dead spots and making the yard thicker. Doing a commercial grade aerate of the yard then putting seed and fertilizer down. Flex daily is what I’m doing with a cycle soak so it won’t be doing a full 25 minutes in one shot. I’ll talk again is my lawn guy about twice a day, but he said once day after 4am is good. Road to never water in the evenings. I have some fungus in one portion of the yard that has killed some of my grass. So trying to prevent that from happening again. Yard is back to being pretty green so he said as long as I get 1.25” down a week, I would be good to go.
Depending on settings, Flex Daily will want to water about every 3 days. It’s hard to MAKE it water every day, and in general, you shouldn’t be watering established grass every day. Maybe a little extra, added by a Fixed schedule, to wet you new seed, or do that manually.
No need to twice a day, but watering every day will keep the surface wet, not promote deep roots, etc. Grass should dry out on the top before watering. That’s the whole idea of Flex Daily. 4AM is fine; I prefer a little later. They say you should finish by 10 AM if possible.
Finally, someone mentions fungus! So many here water only at night, starting midnight or even earlier. That is really bad for the grass (great for water consumption, but bad for the grass). Fungus is just one problem resulting from that.
I think that 1.25" is week is a good target. Using your measured (and calculated) 0.4" per hour should insure you get it.