Planning to setup a drip cup plan for the entire home. Starting with what I thought would be the easiest 2 zones, which are the the mulch beds in front of the home that have flowers/shrubs spaced out.
Front of the house has mulch beds with spaced out flowers and a few shrubs.
The left zone has 3 heads rainbird 10 van and the right zone has 3 heads rainbird 10 as well. Each of those zones is about 240sqf. Those heads are suppose to have 3in/hour but want to do test cups to be sure.
How many drip cups should I put down per zone and where should they go? I’ve read the instructions but they talk more about lawns rather than this style.
My main question however is, when I put down the orbit drip cups they are high so that don’t catch a lot of water since since these type heads shot the water lower to the ground in general. Which is good, but not sure how to capture all the water in the cups, do I need to dig holes for each so the top of each cup is level with the ground?
From the support doc " If there are any bubbler, emitter, or mister nozzles in the watering time, we DO NOT Smart Cycle. Why? Most drip zones are either watering flowers with short run times to begin with, or shrubs/trees which require deep root watering. " – So I would definitely put the zones with these kind of nozzles in their own flex daily schedule.
I’m no expert in this area, but I’m thinking your idea of digging holes down for the cups is good. You might want to try what I ended up doing with my drip emitter zones. I checked the water meter reading, ran the zone for 10 minutes, checked the reading again, and from there calculated the rate my emitters were putting water down, and then defined a custom nozzle.
Part of using the drip cups is to figure out efficiency. With your setup for these plants, I don’t think efficiency is going to be critical. (For right or for wrong, I set my drip ones at 90% and it seems to work well)
I remember seeing a note a while back about having a seperate schedule for those flower zones. I think my concern about that at the time was, wasn’t sure if Rachio was smart enough to handle multiple filex daily schedules. Since if both schedules are set to start on 5am, was worried Rachio might try to start both the flower schedule and the lawn on the same day at the same time, and would reduce water pressure.
But does Rachio make sure to not to have two schedules running at the same time?
Tried the catch cup method in that zone first as wanted to calculate efficiently as well. Put 6 cups down for 5 minutes and saw a wide range including 25ml, 37ml, 24ml, 28ml, 22ml, 40ml. If those numbers were accurate that would mean effecienty would be about 75% and percip rate would be only 1.3ish vs the supposed 3in. Those numbers are widly off however because the orbit cups down even with the bottoms in the ground a bit down catch all the low water.
So looks like will need to get them level with the ground. But even then think as you agreed with, the water meter method may be more accurate in this case. Thanks for your help, will give it a whirl!
I run two Flex Daily schedules - one for my lawn and one for my drip zones. Rachio won’t run both schedules at the same time. One will start and finish before the other. In my case, since I have drip emitters, I chose a time to start watering my lawn in the early morning (around 4am as I recall), and then I chose to do my drip zones around 9am. You might want to split your start times for the two different schedules just for your own convenience (sanity) in tracking what’s going on.
