Fine tuning flex schedule using available water capacity

[franz]

Continuing the discussion from Three years and still no Gallons per Hour?:

@azdavidr @rrubino

Just creating a new topic from this valuable thread

Questions posed to @azdavidr…

@rrubino

Thank you for those resources … working calculations now…What do you suggest for “Crop Coefficients” for winter grass? Summer grass?

For shrubs/trees, one challenge i face is having a near-acre of drip line and a fairly wide mix of plants/trees/ground cover. Emitter sizes/qty controls this, but having it on a single zone is not ideal especially when trying to do the math for flex schedules.

my yard is basically 3 main areas: grass (5 zones) dripline(1 zone) and citrus tree bubblers (1 zone)

I’d love to dial all that into flex schedules, but it is scary to see water times of nearly 5 hours for drip and 2 hours for citrus (“how is that SAVING water?” lol) its hard to wrap your head around, but think i am close.

Crop coefficiency is the hard thing right now - that and estimated root depth.CC for winter grass is currently set to .8 on my system; drip lines are at .55; citrus at .6Root depth is 30 inch for citrus and 18 inch for drip lines

sound good?

[azdavidr]

@franz

Thank you for those resources … working calculations now…What do you suggest for “Crop Coefficients” for winter grass? Summer grass?

@rrubino I suggest starting with the defaults. You can then tweak them if you feel that your grass should be getting watered more or less frequently.

@franz

For shrubs/trees, one challenge i face is having a near-acre of drip line and a fairly wide mix of plants/trees/ground cover. Emitter sizes/qty controls this, but having it on a single zone is not ideal especially when trying to do the math for flex schedules.

I agree, that’s a huge challenge. It’s a function of how your irrigation system was setup however, so no controller would really be able to address that.

@franz

I’d love to dial all that into flex schedules, but it is scary to see water times of nearly 5 hours for drip and 2 hours for citrus (“how is that SAVING water?” lol) its hard to wrap your head around, but think i am close.

Keep in mind that with the longer watering times, you should expect to see less frequent watering. If you look at the total water delivered by your system over the period of a few weeks, or a month, you should see that you used less or the same water overall.

@franz

Crop coefficiency is the hard thing right now - that and estimated root depth.CC for winter grass is currently set to .8 on my system; drip lines are at .55; citrus at .6Root depth is 30 inch for citrus and 18 inch for drip lines

The grass seems about right, but it’s hard for me to comment on the others as they are a function of your vegetation. I don’t have any citrus. Maybe others here can comment?

Good work sticking with it. It seems like you’re figuring it out and it will ultimately pay off to do so!

[rrubino]

thanks again! The citrus is in good shape since its on its own zone with heavy flow bubblers. One question i do have regarding grass tho is: when you overseed for winter, do you typically do set/timed intervals for seeding? For example I usually water 4x per day for 5 min each zone to get the seed going. Do you all use this approach with Rachio? I would assume so but thought i’d ask since I’m new to the differences.

[azdavidr]

@rrubino

when you overseed for winter, do you typically do set/timed intervals for seeding?

Yep. I set up fixed schedules for the overseeding period. Once the grass is established you can switch to Flex.

[Modawg2k]

@rrubino

when you overseed for winter, do you typically do set/timed intervals for seeding?

Here’s what I set up today. 4 fixed interval schedules

[JPedrego]

Regarding crop coefficient I set my citrus coefficient using the number found at this website with a tweak since my trees aren’t considered established and also I am in AZ while the below numbers were developed in Cali

http://www.fao.org/docrep/x0490e/x0490e0b.htm

I currently have them set at .95.

For non fruit/vegetable plants I’ve found it pretty hard to find a good crop coefficient. When I googled the plant type I had to browse several websites and if I was lucky I sometimes found research papers that calculated crop coefficients for plants related to the one I was looking for.