I have a 3000 sqft backyard. It is made up on 3 zones, 1,2,3.
Zone 2 is in the middle, and covers both zone 1 and 3.
My question is, what is the best way to setup this in rachio?
Each zone has rotary nozzle, that I measured out to be .6 gallons/hr
It makes sense to have zone 1 and 3 with this .6 gallons/hr setting, but what would be best practice for zone 2 (I don’t really want it over watering).
Tips?
Are zones 1 and 3 half circle heads? If so, they should only need half as much time as the full circle heads in the middle.
Not sure what u mean,
They are hunter rotary heads are a pgp with a 2.0 gpm nozzle in them.
Zone 1 and 3 only travel the 180degrees
You can’t set time on flex daily. All 3 zones water same amount of time
Zones 1 and 3 are 180’s or half turn heads and I’m assuming the ones in the middle are 360 degrees or full turn heads. If all 3 zones are watering the same amount of time then zone 1 & 3 are receiving twice as much water.
Correct. I don’t want that. I’m asking what the best approach is to correct this
You could adjust the area settings in advanced setup but not sure if that will have an effect on watering time. In other words, the 180’s would cover half as much area.
Adjusting area settings is only used for calculating how much water you used. It has nothing to do with how much the system is going to water
I have zone 1 and 3 at 1000sqft and zone 2 at 3000sqft. Same times in all zones. That doesn’t fix the issue unfortunately
Still wasting water
@Linn, can’t you specify max amount of time per zones somewhere? I remember doing something along
these lines somewhere but I can’t remember where.
Not that I know of. Perhaps someone else knows.
Maybe it was during the setup process.
I also had an overlapping area where I cut the watering time in half. But it would be much better to make the adjustment by changing the “nozzle Inches per hour” in the advanced settings than by changing the duration itself. That way if you need to make other changes to your zones they will pick up correctly. Changing just the duration overrides a lot of things, and may make you wonder why something isn’t working the way you thought it would down the row. When I did mine, they were set to 1 inch per hour, and I changed the two zones that almost identically overlap to 2 inches per hour. That had the same effect of cutting the watering time in half, and it’s probably what is happening with the overlap.
@Linn
So if I am at .6inch/hr for zone 1,2,3, and zone 2 is in the middle (waters both 1 and 3 as in my picture attached) you would change zone 2, to 1.2inch/hr and leave 1 and 3 at the .6inch/hr?
I think I would start out by doing it the other way around. If I’m understanding this correctly, zone 2 waters pretty much everything (which begs the question, do you even need to use zones 1 and 3???). But zones 1 and 3 don’t water what part of zone 2 covers. So you would want zone 2 to be it’s actual output, which in your case looks to be .6inch/hr. Then I would change zones 1 and 3 to be 1.2 inch/hr, or perhaps even higher. You may just have to observe this for awhile.
Are you on a fixed schedule or flex daily?
Daily
Ill try that. I emptied all 3 of the zones, set zone 2 to .6inch/hr , and zone 1 and 3 to 1.1 inch/hr , due to water tomorrow. see what happens. Right now zone 2 shows 1hr 16 min, and zone 1 and 3 at 15 min.
Something’s wrong there. For your set Nozzle rates, zone 2 should be 1.1/.6 = 1.83x as long as zone 1 & 3. 1:16 and 0:15 is a difference of 5 to 1. Check other zone variables.
You lost me
If you’re letting Rachio calculate your watering time, it will use your Soil type (Available Water), Root Depth and Allowed Depletion to calculate how much water to apply. Those should be the same for all 3 zones. It will then use your Nozzle Inches/Hour and Efficiency to calculate the time required to apply that much water. If soil and crop (grass) are the same, and two zones have Nozzle Flows twice what the other zone has (2 are 1.2, 1 is 0.6), then the minutes of watering to accomplish this would be half the time in zones 1 and 3 than in zone 2. Your zone 2 is 5 times as long (1hr 16 min vs 15 min), not twice (or close to twice, using 1.1 instead of 1.2). So I’m concerned something is different somewhere not being mentioned.
