in particular - the iro suggested watering times for drip irrigation seemed really low. (10 minutes every 3 days) I extended the time quite a bit, but wasnt sure if there was a resource I should check.
Also - not clear to me if the Iro recommendations for the every 3 days was the right call in my area. Is it pulling that recommendation from a local data source - or should I be mucking with it more?
Thanks!
@jparansky , that recommendation comes from the average weather data recorded at Raleigh State for July: a daily high temperature ranging from 69-90F, with a total of 4.28 inches of rain/month. With that kind of rain, you probably don’t need to water much.
Still, if you’re having an unusually hot or dry July, or if your lawn is just looking thirsty, consider raising those times. The city of Raleigh recommends no more than 1 inch of water/week (see http://www.raleighnc.gov/services/content/PubUtilAdmin/Articles/WaterConservationAndEfficiency.html) , which is about 40 minutes/week with a typical popup sprinkler head, and that’s not counting rain. For that temperature range, 15 or so minutes every 3 days shouldn’t be too far off, and if you get a lot of rain, Weather Intelligence can skip those days anyhow.
I wouldn’t recommend raising the frequency (times/week) too much though–it’s much better for your lawn to give it deep waterings once or twice a week than to give it shallow watering every day. If you see runoff during those longer waterings, I’d turn on Smart Cycle, which will deliver that long soaking in little “gulps” that your soil can handle.
@coslor - thank you. the setting for grass watering seems right on now living with it for a couple weeks - I haven’t mucked with it at all and with water intelligence seems to be handling quite nicely. The real question I had was with the drip irrigation setting (where 10 minutes seems lower than other online recommendations for drip systems) - which left my drip irrigated plants looking pretty under watered.
@jparansky Drip systems vary quite a bit in the amount of water they deliver unlike rotors or fixed heads which are more calibrated. It is possible that our defaults are different than what your specific drip system can deliver. If you see that the plants long the drip line need a little more water, I would suggest you manually increase the watering time for that zone incrementally over time until it appears your plants are happy.
Having just been through this…
I replaced an existing system, so had a little bit of an idea of how much water I needed. The Iro wanted to water my grass about 4x more than my previous system, but it also doesn’t know I have drought resistant grass, etc. I didn’t want to change the settings manually, as I thought that would override all the algorithms. It doesn’t. Tweak those times until you are comfortable. Iro takes over after that.
For my drip/bubblers, the system wanted to underwater, so had to up those. Actually setting drip wanted too much time. There isn’t a bubbler setting, though there should be, so I just chose spraying sprinklers, which got the time closer. I adjusted from there.
David
@daviddelano , we’re going to make make more precise settings available to power users like you in an upcoming release, hopefully 1.7. Keep an eye out for news on that.