SPRINKLER TALK FORUM - You Got Questions, We've Got Answers

i just recently bought a house with this sprinkler system. right now i have programs B and C turned off. program A is set to water the front yard (station 1) for 40 minutes, the front flower beds (station 2) for 20 minutes, the backyard (station 3) for 40 minutes, and the small side yard/flower bed (station 4) for 20 minutes. i have it on calendar format to come on every sunday at 4 am.

today is sunday, and the sprinklers in the front yard were running at 10:30 am when i came home. i had a ton of runoff in the street. i checked out the rest of the property and everything was soaked. it looked like the system had been constantly running since 4 am... what have i done wrong?

as of right now, i have all the stations set to come on at 4 am. i was reading in the manual and it seems like this might be my problem? although the manual did say "A start time that occurs while a watering cycle is already in progress will be delayed until the active watering cycle is finished".

thanks

so i need to go in and reset station 2 to come on at 440 am, station 3 come on at 5 am and station for come on at 540 am? and that should fix everything?

also, is the 40 min once a week for the lawn too much? i have been told that st augustine does best with an inch of rain per week, and its better to get all that inch at the same time rather than spread out. this makes that water soak in deep, keeping the roots growing deep rather than up near the surface where you will have lots of die off in the winter

Quoted from "Wet_Boots"

a controller is not a VCR, and it doesn't program like one

ONE SINGLE START TIME

so start time for station 1 is 4 am, then dont enter a start time at all for the other 3 stations?

Quoted from "Wet_Boots"

you think you are starting a station, or a zone, but you are not ~ you are starting a program ~ one start time is all that is needed to have every station in the program to run in sequence

yes i have mistaken the program start time with station run times. i had all 4 programs set to turn on at 4 am. i just need to keep the first program coming on at 4 am, then turn the other 3 program start times to OFF?

Quoted from "Mitchgo"

Only 1 Program and ONLY 1 start time.

It goes like

Program A> Start time 1 > Zone run time - If all zones have minutes inputed into Program A then start time 1 will run through all the zones. So if each zone is set for 10 minutes. Start time 1 will start up zone 1- run for 10 min, then zone 2- run for 10 min, zone 3 - run for 10 min and zone 4. Then the system will stop.

If you use start time 2 , 3 and 4 and will do the exact same thing. As well as the controller has stackable start times. So if you have 4 start times all at 4 am. with all zones running 10 minute. Start time 1 will finish with a total run time of 40 minutes. Then it reverts back to Start time 2- with another 40 minutes of run time and so on

Program A) Zone run times
Start Time 1)
Start Time 2)
Start Time 3)
Start Time 4)

Program B ) Zone run times
Start time )1 And so on...

thank you. this is the first reply i have gotten that actually makes sense.

wetboots- this is 2011, nobody has a VCR anymore