I've talked about the juniper removal and replacement with sod, but I'm not sure I mentioned watering this new sod. That's about to change.
The controller I have for my sprinkler system feels much more complicated (to me) than the one I had at my house in Minnesota. That was felt easy and straightforward. This one? Not so much.
I've relied on other people to set it for me. The landscaper. My brother. But my yard is just a muddy, sodden mess and I didn't understand why.
I also didn't understand how my water bill could be as ridiculous as it was.
Then I tried to adjust the time on the controller myself, made everything worse with zones running twice, and I was like what is going on?
Finally, on Saturday, I did a search for the manufacturer/controller names. Found a YouTube video that the company created about how to program the controller. It was eye opening to say the least. What I thought were Zones were program numbers.
PROGRAM NUMBERS!
My sprinkler was running THREE times. Every day.
When the landscaper had it scheduled to run for an hour for the new sod, it was running for three hours.
I didn't notice this because I was sleeping while most of the running was happening, but when I adjusted the times, it started running while I was awake and that's when I noticed it was going off twice. Actually, it was still going off three times, but I wasn't up for the first one.
With the YouTube video fresh in my mind, I went to the controller and turned off programs 2 and 3. Verified that program 1 was hitting all three zones and turned it to run.
Of course, I'm going to continue to monitor the situation to make sure I did it right, but I'm hoping this takes care of how wet and muddy my yard is. The water bill is still going to be outrageous this month, but hopefully that goes down next month.
What a mess.
