Rachio for Rainbird XFS 0918 lawn drip irrigation

I’ve about finished installing Rain Bird XFS 0918 drip tubing to water my lawn.

I picked drip irrigation for several reasons. First there is less water loss to evaporation. Second the cost of having a sprinkler system installed was $5000, but I’m doing the drip irrigation for less than $2,000 in materials. Last, my city’s water restrictions don’t apply to drip irrigation.

I’ve been lugging drip hoses over the lawn for over a decade and it is a pain in the butt. I started by installing a single zone in my side yard next to the driveway. I cut the lawn as short as the mower would allow then staked the tubing down. I didn’t burry the tubing figuring that once the grass recovered that it would be buried in the turf. I also figured that the tubing not being buried would make avoiding piercing the tubing with stakes for the Halloween and Christmas decorations and repairs much easier. The side yard did great! So last spring I installed 3 more zones to cover the backyard and the yard on the other side of the house. In a couple of weeks I’ll install 3 zones to cover the front yard and be done with hauling soaker hoses.

The spring project will be installing sprinkler valves and a sprinkler controller for my drip irrigation. The Rachio sounds like the best product for the job. I like the idea of using hyper-local weather information similar to Dark Sky to control watering.

Any recommendations for integrating Rachio into my irrigation setup?

I have an 8th zone around the house to provide extra watering for the foundation and bushes around the house. Here in DFW we can develop foundation issues from the expansion and contraction of the clay in our soil. Each zone has between 400 and 500 0.9gal.hour drip emitters spaced 18 inches apart. I’ve been watering for 2 hours per zone once a week and this seems to be enough for all but a couple of problem areas. If I find that the problem areas are genuinely due to lack of water, it is easy to splice in more drip emitters.

Any suggestions?

I’ve seen this type of irrigation all over in commercial applications. With water efficiency becoming increasingly more important I believe drip lawn irrigation is going to become more and more common.

Nice!

Assuming you are using standard solenoid valves to turn on/off your drip system it shouldn’t be different than installing any other irrigation controller.

Drip is all fairly new to me, maybe someone else on the forum has experience in this arena. Definitely post some pictures when it is all done, I’ve been looking into this type of system for some time.

Thanks for sharing!

:cheers: