Hi,
I am a newbie having only installed my controller a week ago. For background, I have a 20k sf lawn with 8 zones covering it. My house is on well water only so I have 2 pressure tanks run in parallel where the well pump charges tank 1 then tank 1 supplies tank 2. Pressure tank 1 feeds the irrigation system (and tank 2) and tank 2 supplies the house.
I currently have 3 schedules that run 6 days a week as follows:
Zone’s 1,2,3 - Monday & Thursday
Zone’s 4,5,6 – Tuesday & Friday
Zones 7,8 – Wednesday & Saturday
Schedule run times are ~2.5 hours per day. The issue/question I have is that I would like to have a 15 minute delay at roughly the 1 hour mark to let the pump and pressure tank “catch up” and have a breather.
I attempted to use the “delay between zones” feature on the schedule but it seems as though I lose my “cycle & soak” capabilities with each zone running for its full length then pausing with the value I entered in the delay between zones field.
Watering a single zone for 40 minutes or more causes some pooling/run off whereas the cycle and soak would take care of that issue.
From my reading, there is no feature (hopefully Rachio will add this) that I can specify a pause in a schedule at a specific time so I am left with either leaving it as-is or going back to cycle & soak and potentially having very low pressure to drive the heads in the later part of the schedule.
Until and unless Rachio comes out with an advanced “pause” schedule for us well owners do any of the experts on this board have any ideas on how I can “trick” the system into giving me both cycle & soak as well as a delay at some point during the schedule?
Thanks in advance for anyone who responds.
Ned