Irrigation Blues

Water is on my mind this afternoon.

The landscaping is part of what attracted us to this house. To support the beautiful plants, it comes with two distinct watering zones and a total of 11 subzones; one each for the many terraces containing mixes of perennials, fruit, ornamental and hardwood trees, as well as a small lawn.

The difficulty comes from having failed to yet figure out how the watering systems actually work. I'm not a technology deficient person, but each zone has a programmable controller and individual subzone watering settings. With the manual in hand I've tried several times to program them. After each attempt the water either begins at the incorrect time or stays on longer than it should.

Wasted Water = Wasted Money.

Luckily, we've been getting quite a bit of rain over the past month and so I've had the systems turned completely off. The monsoon season is now ending and so I decided to reset the systems once again in the hope that a totally new program would wipe out the systems uh... tendency to ignore my programming instructions.

Right.

Last night at 8:30, zone one, subzone two went off like clockwork followed by zone two, subzone four. Only problem was that both ran for 45 minutes instead of the fifteen I'd programmed. Oh, and I "thought" I hadn't scheduled the first one to go off until 10:30 p.m. and programmed the second for 5:45 a.m.

Sigh... maybe I’m just quibbling. After all, Einstein proved that time is relative.