Irrigation Scheduling

Scheduling of your irrigation system is one of the most important components of your system.  The following are suggestions to help you determine how to program your irrigation system to be the most efficient.

  1. Water early in the morning, when the wind is calm. The least amount of water is lost thru evaporation.
  2. Water deeply.  The objective is to wet the entire root zone and let the soil dry down before irrigating again.
  3. Cycle and Soak, reduce your run time on your zones by half, run an irrigation cycle and allow that water to soak into the soil and then repeat.  This increases the amount of water actually absorbed into the soil and reduces water runoff and waste.
  4. Adjust your irrigation system run times with seasonal changes and rain fall amounts on a weekly basis.
  5. Upgrade your irrigation system with rain or soil sensors to reduce unnecessary watering.

Remember the most common irrigation scheduling mistake is to over water or water to frequently. Many common turf grass and landscape diseases are caused by watering to frequently.

Experts at Colorado State University recommend applying enough water to moisten the root zone.  They recommend using a soil probe to determine the average root zone depth of your lawn.  If the roots are six inches deep, water to that depth.  Various soils require different amounts of water to wet the root zone.  Heavy soils require 1-1 ½ inches of water, loamy soils require 1 inch of water; sandy soils require ½ inch of water.  Heavy soils will hold moisture longer and require less frequent watering while sandy soils hold less moisture and require more frequent watering.

Irrigation schedule recommendations:

  • Rotor zones   20-30 minutes
  • Lawn spray zones   10-15 minutes
  • Landscape spray zones   5-7 minutes
  • Landscape drip zones     30-45 minutes

This is a good starting point, watch the lawn and landscape carefully and make adjustments to the run time based upon your lawns actual needs.  Program the lawn zones and landscape zones on different programs the lawn may need to run 5 days a week but the landscape may only need 3 days a week.  If you need help programming the timer go to the support page and click controllers, find your controller and click on the link to the owner’s manual.

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