I currently have a Hunter control box with 19 zones but 5 of those zones are for the sand trap blow out My question is when you set up a schedule do you have to go in order or can you go back to different zones. I.e, Zone 3 is the sand trap blow out and I need to run that zone after ever 2 or three zones. Right now that zone is set up with a different zone numbers and runs in zone order. If I’m able to go back to that zone I will have 14 zones.
You can reorder zones in Rachio by dragging and dropping them on the phone app. I /think/ this will then change the order they run in.
You can also wire the zones to the Rachio in the order you want them.
Not sure if this helps you or not, but it is a bit of information for you.
Thank you. I think that answers my question and figured this would work but thought I should check. So I’m assuming you can run the same zone more than once in a program? I would need to run the sand trap clean out zone 3 or 4 times with each cycle.
I didn’t say that. Any maybe you misunderstood me. You can sort the zones any way you want using the app, and of course the hard-wiring. But any schedule then created will water the zones in the order created. And you can’t run the same zone more than once in a program, other than with the Cycle & Soak feature, which is a property of the schedule and not the zone.
You can of course have multiple schedules for the same zone.
Thanks again. I didn’t ask the question very well the first time. I guess this will still work but I will have to set up several programs instead of one. Was hoping I could just do it with one program but no big deal.
How does the sand trap blowout work under your existing Hunter box? Do you run it for just a minute when you need to, or a longer duration?
Assuming you can’t have the sand trap blowout run concurrently with another zone, you could use the two remaining zones of a 16 zone controller to tie into the same zone wire as the sand trap blowout and effectively have 3 opportunities to activate the blowout in a given schedule. So if 3,15, and 16 are tied to the sand trap blowout, have schedule A go: 1,2,3,4,5,15,6,7,16
and schedule B go: 8,9,3,10,11,15,12,13,14,16
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Another thing to consider is being able to combine other zones together if:
a) they have the same zone characteristics (plant type, sun exposure, slope, nozzle type, etc)
and
b) you have sufficient water pressure to support running those two zones concurrently
If this is the case, you can pair those zones to a single zone terminal and have extra terminals for the sand trap blowout as mentioned in the prior reply.
I recently changed my sprinkler nozzles from spray to MP rotators, dropping precipitation rates from 1.5-2"/hr to 0.4"/hr. I get more efficient watering/soaking with the new nozzles, but my watering times to put down a half inch of water went up significantly. I countered my total run time increase by pairing up two sets of identical characteristic zones, lowering my total zone count by two. The one downside to lower precipitation rates/longer zone run time is that if there is an issue like a broken sprinkler head or equivalent, I will lose a lot more water than before, so it is important to do periodic checks to ensure all equipment is functioning correctly.
Thanks for the feedback.
That is how my current Hunter system is set up as well, so I will try to do the same with the Rachio but don’t think I will have quite enough zones so I may have to run 2 programs.