Run time and head to head coverage

If irrigation is to be installed with head to head coverage in mind, such as mine is, and you create a schedule that includes two zones for example, wouldn’t the Iro’s proposed watering time need to be cut in half?

No, a well designed system needs head to head coverage. Otherwise you won’t have uniform coverage

So then how does the Iro know which zones are overlapping and which ones aren’t?

It doesn’t know unfortunately. But if the zone settings are identical and on the same schedule they should be watered on the same day. I don’t think I’ve seen my overlapping zones skew

With all the same settings, my adjacent zones do stay in sync and run on the same days (on Flex Daily). I seem to have problems, though, whenever I test my sprinklers (fixing a sprinkler, etc.). I inevitably run one zone a bit longer than the others and they get out or sync.

I would love being able to set an arbitrary number on the moisture balance adjustment rather than just “fill” or “empty”, which is the only way to get them back in sync now.

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I agree. I have the issue.

No. Equal run times. 100 percent sure.

I see this is an old thread i bumped into…

To resynch, you could manually water to provide the same irrigation amount that you would be adjusting the moisture level, thus bringing the zones back to the same moisture level. (eg. test one zone for 10 minutes, then water the other zone for the same 10 minutes)

Why is it important to keep the zones in synch? why not let each zone water independently on different dates? Wouldn’t this approach reduce the impact of overlapping zones, as the overlapped area would never be double watered on the same day?

Because the overlapping zones only overlap by half (at least in my case, though I suspect in most cases).

With head to head coverage, one head does half the watering between those two heads and the other head does the other half. That’s true in general, even within the same zone.

At the zone boundary, one zone does half and the other zone does the other half. So if the two get out of sync, you do two half waterings on different days, rather than the full deep watering you should get.

Got it now… I thought the zone overlap was excess watering, not that you needed both zones running to properly cover the ‘in-between’ areas.

Mine does the same where one zone will contribute to another zone’s total applied water, so if I run one zone on Day 1, and the other zone on Day 2, then those areas are not getting the deep watering they are meant to get at one time.