I live in the desert. It doesn’t rain here much at all (less than 5" a year). So I hadn’t gotten to see the IRO work its magic until today! It is actually raining at my house right now. I looked at my Flex schedule this morning before the rain and it was watering every day (just different zones each day). Now that its raining, I pulled it up, and it now isn’t going to water again until Friday! Very, very cool!
I did get my earlier issues with extreme run times fixed. I changed the flow rate higher on my bubblers using a custom nozzle and that seemed to take care of most of my issues. I didn’t use a scientific method to choose the new rate - just set it higher and I was going to watch the plant health and tweak it from there. Also the Flex Schedules in 2.0 were much better, since it would water different zones on different days. My water company removed our watering days restrictions in favor of just having to stay under your quota. It will be interesting with the new tweaks how I do in two months. (I REALLY wish we had smart water meters so I could track it more easily, ugh).
Anyway - just wanted to say how pleased I am with finally getting to see the smart features of the IRO!!!
Great, IMHO this is the real power of flex, and the ability to actually see why they are making the decisions made by looking at the moisture graphs.There really is no magic, once you think about each zone like a checkbook with debits (evapotranspiration) and credits (irrigation, precipitation) it makes a lot of sense
@Az_Rael, glad to hear adjusting your nozzle’s precip rate helped. If you have any recommendations on ways to improve the zone setup process, we’re always listening.
My suggestion would be to maybe include some pop up tips in the app that let folks know that bubbler flow rates can vary widely and that the default setting might not be correct. I just assumed the default flow rates were close to average for the various nozzles and left them alone.
Or maybe set the bubbler default rate higher if this is a common issue.
We’ve considered this, it’s a catch-22. I think providing more education on the nozzles is needed. I’ve stumbled across a few visuals lately that I’d like to get incorporated into the app (one below for emitters). Let me know if you think these would help and I’ll add them to the support site in the mean time.
Yes, similar to the warning you get when you choose a personal weather station.
I also like the emitter estimator image - that is very helpful. Maybe even some more “basic” photos like this would help out those of us who aren’t irrigation knowledgeable on the website would be helpful. I didn’t even know what an emitter looked like or that it was different from a bubbler. So more photos of various types of nozzles would be very helpful.
Also - I don’t know if this is already out there, but some information on how to convert GPH to in/hour for emitters or bubblers might be helpful. I dug around the internets when I was trying to estimate my bubblers, but couldn’t really figure it out so decided to just “wing” it with a guess. (lots of complicated formulas - seems like someone should be able to build an online calculator or something). My bubblers don’t actually make the little “umbrella” of water, they just run down the sides of the pipes, making setting up the catch cups pretty difficult.
@Az_Rael, can do! We’ll add these to the support site. Were you thinking of somewhere else when you mentioned on the website?
Agreed. This has been on my wish list for support tools. We do have a support article on the topic (Understanding precipitation rates) – any insights on how this could be better would be appreciated.
Yes, the support site was what I was thinking when I said the website
The precipitation rate formula you have does seem simpler than some of the other ones I had seen online. I guess my question is do you use the whole zone square footage even for emitters, which are placed at each plant and don’t really water the whole zone?
@Az_Rael, I’d recommend applying the average square footage for each plant. i.e. if your zone consists of emitters, and you have one per shrub, it would be easiest to take the GPH for 1 emitter and a square footage of 1 to 2 square feet.
