I just want to thank everybody for coming tonight. My name is Craig Borglum. I am a certified irrigation designer and then EPA Water Sense partner. And when you are trying to talk about controllers and drought issues. As you know in a prolong drought ends it is going to go on so were going to always be stuck with this water restrictions that we have.
The water restrictions that we have, they are not state wide are that you can only water twice a week and you can only water between four pm and ten am which mostly for most of us should be more than enough time. For a lot of large commercial projects that you have a problem with that water window.
Anyway, this is more based toward a residential home owner. I want to start speaking about the controllers. This is a very standard controller probably the most common one that I have see in my work in the residential market. And it is a digital controller which is much better than the old mechanical controllers that you might have seen especially places like Cerasus County and the Waukesha County. You can even have a mechanical controller anymore.
So after I show how to operate this, then I am going to do a small power point showing how to change one on yourself in case you want to do that. So, first let us talk about run times. Sprays which are the little pop up ones, that do not move they popup spray and then pop that down. Those have to run 1/3 of the time as what we call rotors.
Rotors are the big ones that turn and spray a long distance. Quite often, I will go and see if someone has other sprinklers set at 30 minutes. It burst on, where as they might have two sprays on and two rotors on. So, what is happening in this situation is the rotors are not long enough and the sprays might be on a little bit too long.
Now when we water, what we are trying to do is we want to fill the soil area which is about six to eight inches deep. We are not trying to water that much deeper than that because trees and other woody barks should be put to traps they get water without having to put a lot of supplemental water from your sprinkler system.
So, as they are trying to water this area, we are also trying to limit the amount of water that runs off. And also because Florida has very sandy soil, the water has a tendency to percolate down past the weed zone to where it is not available to the plant to use. So there is, what I am going to show is a different kind of way to set your controller versus a, which is a biggest set of where—let us say 20 minutes to this place and hour for the rotors. Which if you have a reasonably efficient sprinkler system that is probably a good ball park theory to use because you cannot get a rill to the minute idea what any individual zone at your house would use without getting a water on it which is a complicated expensive thing.
So we will just assume that we want to run the sprays on for 20 minutes and the rotors on for an hour. Of course that would change if an area is in deep shade you might want to do half the amount. We are talking about areas that are for fun. So rather than running the waters for an hour and spray for 20 minutes, it will be better to run the rotors for 20 minutes and the spray for seven minutes.
Let us set our controller to go on three times consecutively. We have three zones, two rotors and a spray. We will go 20, 27 and then the whole thing would start again. The reason for that is because we are trying to eliminate two things, run off on the top of that for say in modesty. If you are going to ply that much water, run those rotors for an hour at a time. The waters eventually now start to move laterally. Because the percolation rate of the soil is not going to be pure bead sands.
So eventually it is going to stop percolating, stop going down into the soil and start to move laterally across the row. And the other thing is that it is going to go down past the roots. Now water is cohesive. If you take a couple of drops and put on the glass and you see when I catch they become one big drop of water, they will sticks to itself.
A much better way to water your yard is to put down the first application. Because it is a shorter run time it is not going to percolate down this deep and when you put down your second application, the first one will catch that as it is going through. So we put down one and put down another, we already have some water in that roof profile and it will up track that water if you could keep it from repercolating and then we put down some more.
So that way, we have less water running down to the gutters and we also have more water in our roof profile so we do not have to water as long because we are making better use of what we have. Now, we do not always have to use that much water. But the highest evaporate transpiration rates for Central Florida are April, May and June and September, October that is when it is still hot out but the humidity is very low. So when we are in say like now, where lately beginning a lot of rain, it would not be to run it to wait that long, maybe only 80% of that amount of time. So how do you do that without completely going around and changing every zone time?
Well, any of these have digital controller. We have a function here called the water budget or a water adjust, I think hundred cost of water adjust. A water adjust is that we have 60 minutes on zone one and see the sun up through here 20 on that and 60 on that. Let us say we want to use, we think we could drop a run time by about 20%. So instead of changing all of these individually and try to do the amount time to watch the 20% of whatever you are running. You are trying to just budget water in using the up-down buttons, if we bring this down to 70% and you start this controller, now and still of the zone one running for 60 minutes is going to run 42. And what was running 20 minutes is now going to run 14.
When we get in the wintertime, we can probably set this down to 30 or 40% of what you needed during the hottest, least humid parts of the year. Now I am going to show you how to run and it brings back of 200 and I am going to show you how to set this run times. Okay, that is 60 minutes, so we do not want to do that. We are going to bring that down to 20, and then we are going to take this next one. There are 20, that is spray zone and we are going to bring it down to 7.
What we are going to do is we are going to make this controller start three times. So we get to the first start time, let us say we make that 3am and let us say of these time together here equals 50 minutes. We are going to go to our next start time. And because we are not going to be running a full hour. We are going to make that one start at 4am and we are going to the stirring run time and we are going to make that start at 5am.
In this way we are not trying to buy all the water at one time. And that is called serine cycling method and it is much better way than trying to ply the water at once. So let us say you have an old mechanical controller with a little white pins and you know it is hard to tell you exactly how long it is running and you cannot make it start multiple times.
So you may want to in order to save money since this is water budget function makes it easy to change your run times, you more likely to go out and do that and if it is a complicated for real with mechanical controllers. So I am going to explain how if you want one of the older type controllers, you can take it and change it to a digital controller.
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