Irrigation on B&W touch screen

Can somebody get me started
I will use PICED
Irrigation system
12 zones 1 pump output 1 rain sensor (input)

I need a way of automatically scheduling each of the 12 zones to come on in succession IF the rain sensor indicates it is dry (NO contact). Each zone activation also needs to activate the pump.

I would like to give the customer as much option of changing the schedule as possible.

Start times of each zone
duration of each zone.

 

Howdi Household,
You can achive this with a B&W touch and a PAC and a little creativity.

Wouldn't it be nice if the touch had the logic engine built in.

 

The Irrigation Controller in HomeGate, Schedule Plus and Colour C-Touch will do what you want nicely. Unfortunately this hasn't gone into the Black and White C-Touch Yet.

You should be able to do what you want by having the rain sensor Group Address used as the "enable group" for a series of Schedules. These Schedules can then trigger a series of "cascaded Scenes" (see the FAQ) to do the irrigation. It isn't ideal, but it has been done by others.

There is also an irrigation sample project which shows how to do some of it.

The alternative would be to use a PAC in conjunction with the C-Touch, but you won't be able to change any of the irrigation parameters inside the PAC without re-transferring the project.

 

Does this mean Irrigation Controller may appear in B/W Ctouch ??

Charles

 

There are no plans to at this stage, but it is on the "to do" list (a long way down )

 

I have tried many times to 'Cascade scenes' from the C-Touch and it just won't work for me. I find that the scene levels are transmitted immediately and thus all cascaded scenes are triggered instantly - which is no good because there is no delay between scenes

So, if there is some sort of trick to it, I would be very pleased to know about it....I tried looking up the FAQ but couldn't find mention of the cascading...

The way I got my irrigation to work was to set-up minimun turn-on thresholds on the relay unit (one unit). Equally stagger e.g. :
channel 1 - 88%
channel 2 - 76%
channel 3 - 64%
...
channel 8 - 12%
etc...

and then turn-on channel interlock (only available on channels 1-8) - note this is only available if the unit is on-line and not in the database...btw - why is that? The interlock turns on the highest channel and turns off the other channels.

change all group addresses for channels 1-8 to be the same. Then ramp the group from 100% to 0% for your period of time.

the only problem is the amount of time per channel

if there is a better solution then I would love to hear about it because multiple schedules becomes clumsly and changing them is a bitch, especialy when you have a seven - day on-off matrix (7days * 8 zones = 56 schedules - NASTY )

 

A very common mistake is try to use the end of a ramping Group Address to trigger something. This doesn't work, as the thing you are trying to trigger gets triggered as soon as the message is sent, not at the end of the ramp.

You need to pulse a Group Address in a Scene and use the falling edge of the pulse to trigger the next Scene.

If you look in the FAQ under a topic called "Delays Between Scene Actions" you will see how to do it.