Orbit Sprinkler Timer Tutorial

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Hey guys, hope you're doing well. Let's continue to talk about sprinkler timers and how to set them up and make adjustments. This here is an Orbit brand timer. These are common. You may have this at your house. It's pretty common for people to buy these at Lowe's or Home Depot. While it's not necessarily the brand we recommend, if you have this, it's not a problem. But if it's working well then I wouldn't change it by any means, but it's just not something we'd recommend as a Salt Lake sprinkler repair.Let's go through a quick run through on how to set this thing up. So here's the big dial. This dial spins. You want to line it up with this arrow. So whatever is lined up with this arrow is what it's set to. So leaving it on auto just means it's going to run its program the way you've got to set up, it's going to do its thing. So let's rotate through each and just show you how to set this up. So rotate over to set clock. So you've got the time. We literally just hit up and down to set your time. So you just scroll through, find the time. Pretty straightforward. The next one is setting the date, so set the year. Then you can hit the right arrow and then you can set, if you see that M meaning the month, and you can just hit the up or down arrows to adjust the year, the month, the day. So then you're on the month and then you're going to go to the day. So this is basically saying that it's August 1st, 2019. We're going to flip over to your start time. Start time is 4:00 AM, which is actually what I recommend right around that range. Depending on how long your sprinklers run, you don't want to start it late at night because you're going to get water sitting on the surface of your lawn all night long, which is really bad because it could cause fungus and other major problems.But you don't necessarily want to be running when it's hot, and the sun is out because a lot of that water's going to be evaporated. So I typically like to end the run time, so all of the zones are finishing up just as the sun is rising. So 4:00 AM perfect time there, and then your runtime. Your runtime is going to be each zone. So you can see how it says station number one, 15 minutes. You can go up or down to make adjustments there, and you're going to hit the right arrow, which takes it to station two. You'll notice there's a big difference. That first one was 15 minutes. The second one was 30 minutes.I'm guessing that this is just because there's several different types of heads. So if you have the heads that are just constantly spraying a mist in the same area, they just pop up, and they constantly spray that same area, you're going to want to run for a little less time. However, if you have the heads that are rotating around just spinning, you probably need to up the time, sometimes up to twice as long, just because there's less heads, they're covering a lot more grass, and they're not constantly spraying the same area. So you're going to want to go through each station, set these how you want just based off of your experience with the lawn. If you see one drying out versus the others, you can just adjust each zone individually instead of everything at once. Then we're going to go to how often. So with how often you will notice you've got these little square boxes, these square boxes on this particular brand mean that that day is set to run. So you've got Sunday, you've got Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Because they've got that square box means that they will run, they will turn on at this time of 4:00 AM every Tuesday morning, Thursday, and so forth. I would never water more than five days a week in the summer unless your grass is really, really dry, or you have new sod. I would prefer you to run four or five days and just turn the minutes up so that you're watering more deeply, which means that your roots of your grass are just going to go really deep and follow the water. If you're watering less minutes, but just more often, the water does not soak very deep, meaning your roots don't have to hardly do anything. They're not going to grow down. They're just going to follow the water. They're going to get lazy and your lawn is not going to be able to handle this hot weather as easily.?Another cool thing is you can go to budget. So if you feel like you have all of your zones dialed in as far as minutes wise, but you get a sudden change in the weather, the temperature or rain or moisture, you can literally just adjust it. So if we get a really hot dry spell, rather than go to every zone and add minutes, you can just add 10 20 30% whatever you need to do or you can take it down to less than a 100%. So it's a really good way, if you feel like you've dialed in each zone the minute wise, and just need to up everything at a very even consistent rate, just do that percentage. It's actually really cool. You can leave it on off. That will just mean if we have several days of rain and you don't want to water, leave that bad boy on off. Just don't forget to come back and turn it on. So typically, you're always going to leave it on auto. Say you want to run some manually, so this enter manual button you can hit enter. So if you see all that and you hit enter, again, it's going to run all of your stations one time just manually right here and there. However, if you want to just run a particular zone, here's how you do it. So you'd go back to the auto, you'll hit that enter button once, you can hit right a couple of times and then it's going to stay station one, station two you can go to the station you want to run an add however many minutes you want to run. Keep in mind by doing this on the enter manual, one-time, it's not going to mess with your settings as far as what they're running at your normal time, but it's just going to be for this one run. So now that we've got station three running for 10 minutes, if we leave that on auto, as soon as that turns off, your program is going to run back to the exact same way you have it set up. I hope this helps. If you have any questions, please let us know. I hope this helps keep your lawn green and helps you from not wasting any water. If you have any other sprinkler repair Salt Lake questions or questions on another sprinkler system like the Hunter Pro-C, please let us know. Have a great day.

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