I have a well that has the capability of providing 15 gpm for several hours before it draws down and needs to replenish – obviously I don’t want to draw it down that far as this can cause well collapse and pump damage. Also, because water has to migrate back to the well through the aquifer, the time to recover is longer than the draw down time. The only consumer of well water is the irrigation system (the house uses city water).
I have a R3 16-zone controller + wireless flow meter with 16 zones used and each zone consumes about 10-13 gph. I used a fixed daily schedule last year with a ~20 min cycle time per zone with a 20 min delay between zones.
I would really like to set up a Flex Daily schedule, but Rachio is defaulting to ~30 minutes per zone. My concern is well recovery time after a couple of zones, but also run-off due to 30 min run time on flat ground. Ideally, I would like to use the “Smart Cycle” to address run-off, but because of the way Smart Cycle interleaves zones, it appears as though this would not allow for recovery time for the well.
What would be ideal would be some combination of Smart Cycle (for runoff) with a Max run time (or ideally max actual water consumption from the flow meter) followed by a recovery time for the well.
Second best would be the ability to just add a delay after Rachio turned off water to any zone as it moves from zone to zone - if Smart Cycle was running Zone 1 for 8 minutes prior to moving to Zone 2 to let Zone 1 soak, then the ability to put 5 minutes delay prior to the start of Zone 2 would be neat. Even neater if Rachio figured that 5 minutes into the soaking time when calculating when to come back to Zone 1.
Do either of these exist? Any suggested workarounds?
Another question: I am still trying to read and figure out the Flex Daily parameters and something is unclear – Is the water in the “bucket” tracked even outside of the Flex Daily schedule? My thoughts are that I could put a Fixed Daily of some nominal amount (say 10 min per zone avoiding runoff and adding well recovery time) and then the Flex Daily would then just top up over that when necessary using Delay Between Zones (because I am pretty sure that Smart Cycle without recovery delays would ruin my well) – Would this work?
Thanks!