HI, all. My first post. I had been using a Rachio 2 at my old house for many years, which had an awesome well that never ran dry. When I moved to my current home, naturally I installed a Rachio 3. I have five zones, each with 5-7 Hunter PGP rotors. I have 5 unused “phantom zones”. The problem is the well runs dry. Here’s what our irrigation contractor suggested:
“Basically we found out that it takes 35 mins of operating a gear drive zone with 7 heads on it to run out of water in your well. So in order to recover the well you will need to program as follows. Program the gear drive zones to run for 25 Mins. Program a rest period of 35 mins and then run that zone for an additional 25 mins.”
I can manage that with some very complicated programming, using either the “Delay Between Zones” feature, or phantom zones. Suppose I want to water zones #1 and #2 at 5am. Then I have to create a schedule with zones #1 and #2 (separated by 35 mins) with the start at 5am, stops at 7am. Then I have to run a separate but identical schedule at 7am to give both zones their full 50 minutes.
Can anyone think of a more elegant solution? The trick would be using one Schedule to run the same zone twice.
In theory I could use a jumper wire to have Rachio zone #12 also map to zone #1, then telling Rachio to water #1 or #12 both map to #1. But that is an inelegant hack. And I’m not sure that it’s safe for the electronics.
-P.A.D.