Question about smart watering durations

7
sw238
 Updated at 2020-07-05 15:42:38 UTC
Topic: Smart Watering

Hey, I'm a techie and I have a question about your "smart watering". What is the feedback loop that you use?


My zones are vastly different -- some have very small spray heads, and some have very large rotors that pump out a lot of water. At first glance, I cannot see any way to (a) indicate how much water is delivered per zone or (b) indicate how moist the soil actually is.


Assuming that I have not missed anything, I have a few suggestions:

  1. Provide a mechanism for indicating the water deliver rate for each zone
  2. Provide a mechanism for manually imputing the actual, measured moisture of the soil
  3. Provide a "hint" mechanism for each gone (e.g. "This zone is too dry" / "this zone is too wet") which would in tyrn influence the smart watering.
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Netro Inc
Updated at 2020-07-06 02:48:45 UTC

Dear customer,


Thanks for your feedback and I will forward your sugestions to our R&D. Here are some typical flow rate: 
MISTER: 2 inch/hour
FIX_SPRAY_HEAD: 1.5 inch/hour
BUBBLER/ROTOR_HEAD: 1.0 inch/hour
ROTARY_NOZZLE: 0.7 inch/hour
ROTARY_EMITTER: 0.5 inch/hour


The reason why we use the area and depth flow rate(inch/hour) to calculate the water usage is that when the sprinkler system is professionally designed and installed, the zone is usually covered evenly, which means the large the zone is, the more sprinkler heads it needs. So the equation we use is 


Area(inch^2) x depth flow rate (inch/hour) x time (hour) = water usage(inch^3)

Another way of calculating the water usage is:

Number of heads x volume flow rate (inch^3 per head per hour) x time (hour) = water usage(inch^3)

You can see that the second equation uses the volume flow rate that needs to be provided by the user while the first equation uses the depth flow rate which can be largely determined by the sprinkler type. We actually had an internal debate on this and in the end we decided to go with the first equation because we want to reduce user inputs as much as possible to simplified the setup process. A


Again, thanks for the inputs and thanks for using Netro. 


Thanks,

Netro Support