I am trying to dial in my system Rachio 3 precipitation rates. I have 4 Rainbird 5000 each with a 1.5 gpm nozzle. So each zone puts out 6.84 gpm. I’m on a well with a 6.5 gpm refill. I do have 200 feet of reserve in my well. So I can go over the 6.5 a little bit safely.
I was using the formula of 96.25 x 6.84/ sq feet
My question is I can’t accurately get sq ft per zone as the heads are not in a perfect square or straight line etc. so it’s hard to accurately measure.
What I did though was measure my front yard. Then I have 6 zones covering the front yard. I split the sq feet for the whole front yard by 6 and used that number in my formula. Is this correct? Or should I try to get individual zones some how. I should not that I do have head to head coverage.
Outline those heads, then at all the edges where you’re watering outside that shape, add a margin of half of the throw radius from the heads. Determine that area as the zone area for Rachio, and as the denominator in your PR calculation. If the zones are watering contiguous areas, slight errors in the zone sizes themselves won’t matter much and you can expect that full watering between adjacent zones requires running both (even if on their own schedules). When you’re confident that you’ve got good estimates, you’ll probably never have to measure again.
Thereafter, if you think you might need to account for weird sprinkler placement, nozzle types, or obstructions in a zone, tweak the Advanced / Efficiency zone setting downward (less) from the 80% default.
