I just installed the controller June 2015, and you can see the visible drop in water use. It’s interesting how the arc is similar to when I was manually managing my water use, but much more precise. My lawn and garden look better than they ever have. Plus I’m staying under my budget, which is making me very happy!
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@katerri22, this is an awesome graph! It’s great to hear you’re saving water with the Iro 
Thank you for sharing this with us.
Out of curiosity, did you fine tune any of your zone settings or simply set them up via the initial configuration process? Also, are you using Fixed or Flex schedules? And last question, are you using a National Weather Station or Personal Weather Station?
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How did you get that water graph? I can’t even get last month’s data from my city 
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I have 7 zones all set to flex. There’re all different: Fruit trees, Shrubs on a slope, lawn and annual garden beds. I’m using a National weather station that’s located about 3 miles from my house. Other than change nozzle types a few times during the fine tuning, I kept the same configuration I set up from day one. I occasionally have to turn the fruit trees on manually if the citrus gets too dry, but since I have different trees with different water needs on the same station, it’s not the Iro’s fault. I can honestly say it works perfect right out of the box!
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Our water district is pretty on top of things - they even base our budgets on the daily ET, which works out really well for me now! We can even see our daily water usage on their website. Of course in S. California we pay a lot for our water, so at least they spend some of it on useful stuff. Hoping that El Nino comes soon!
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Ya, that makes sense. Colorado (yet) isn’t quite there…I wanted to do all sorts of comparisons with my usage but it is next to impossible to get historical data.
Yes! Just got it last week. It was an $80 check and I was able to do everything online through bewaterwise.com. You applied for it on their website, then they sent me a confirmation e-mail. Then you buy the product and send them the PDF. It was actually quite easy. I actually paid a little more for the product through Ewing than I could have got it online, but I thought it was important to support a local business and help get the word out on such a great product. They loved seeing how the app on my phone worked.
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Interesting that the flex scheduling worked right out of the box. I tried it and it wanted to increase my water rate by 10X. I immediately turned it off (without any ill effect after two months). I think there is some weirdness with the limitation that I can only set the current moisture level at 0 or 100%. I also assume that I have some of the valve information a bit off. I have, for example, drip lines in my garden boxes.
Sorry, but I’m 99% confident that you have a misconfiguration. Either your pr is too low or your root zone is too deep. Also keep in mind, you can adjust the run time of A flex. I’m using and it works perfectly. You can search for my other posts but when I setup flex it wanted to water about 2 minutes longer than what I had dialed in with my hunter. But I have performed many catch can tests and I use growth regulator on my turf which causes the plant to use water more efficiently (as a side effect) so I can’t hold them to that 2 minute addition, I’m outside the norm
Not trying to come down on you but my neighbors had the same issue and they were both pr related. They switched back to fixed as the opaque nature of flex left them feeling uneasy. We compared water bills this year, pretty sure they are going back to flex next year.
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I have no doubt that I got the PR wrong. The issue was how convoluted it is to get to PR with atypical zone configurations (e.g. my multi-emitter drip system for my raised garden). While I can fairly easily set things in GPM, deriving the PR was a headache. I admit that I gave up on it after a few hours, but I didn’t buy this device to be confronted with confounding equations for my watering. I am getting the benefit of seasonal adjustment with the fixed schedule as well as proactive avoidance of watering post-rain. Not sure what else I am missing with flex.
Agreed with drip. But to compute pr on drip is impossible. It is not a uniform system by definition and would need some intergalactic calculus to describe.
What I did was adjust the pr rate up or down until flex matched my existing watering time. It’s hacky but I’m personally not investing too much time there, let’s face it, if a plant or two needs more or less water, physical augmentation has to occur, not run time adjustments. I stuck with flex because because even on such a heterogenous zone I still got better performance with water usage with my annual beds and vegetable garden.
But I hear ya, drip zones with flex brings some butt hurt.
But flex is still the best thing for turf zones since sliced bread.
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@NickT, sorry to hear of your frustrations setting up your Flex schedule(s). We hope to improve this process in the future. Sounds like you know the GPM for each of your zones? Maybe I could work with you to fine tune the zone attributes a bit to produce some better schedules? Flex relies heavily on the data provided on a per zone basis to make it’s decisions. Not sure if you’ve seen this support article yet, but the chart under “The Basics” is worth reviewing if you haven’t already.
Hope this helps. Happy to review your nozzle settings if you’d like to send me your GPM inputs by zone.
Best, Emil
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