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jfriesne / parkwood_hoa

Experimental HOA issue tracker
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
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Excessive amounts of water being pumped out to the curb #12

Closed jfriesne closed 2 years ago

jfriesne commented 3 years ago

I see that an excessive amount of water is being pumped out of the garage and to the curb; we have a small river running down the street most of the time.

I think this suggests either a leak somewhere, or that the irrigation system is overwatering. Hopefully it's the latter; I see that the irrigation system is set to water zones 2 and 4 for 1.1 and 1.2 hours per day, respectively, which seems excessive.

In order to narrow down cause-and-effect I have disabled the irrigation system for now; if the water being pumped to the street tomorrow is diminished significantly I will take that as evidence that the irrigation system was overwatering; if not, then it's probably something else. In any case I will re-enable the irrigation system tomorrow night to avoid stressing out the plants.

jfriesne commented 3 years ago

I verified that after I disabled the irrigation system for 24 hours, no more water was being pumped out to the street/curb.

From that I conclude that the water waste was being caused by the irrigation system being set to water for too long; to counteract that I have reduced the irrigation times down to 30 minutes. I will monitor that over the next few days to see how that does.

jfriesne commented 3 years ago

After cutting down the irrigation times to 30 minutes per day, the amount of water pumped to the street is diminished, but still there.

I did a brief check to see if any of the irrigation lines were obviously damaged (e.g. chewed on by squirrels), but I didn't see any obvious problems. Then again, it was dark, so I could easily have missed something.

My theory now is that the soil saturates at some point, and after that any additional water applied goes through and gets pumped to the street. To try to avoid that, I've split the schedule in two: 14 minutes or watering at 6PM, and another 14 minutes of watering at 8AM. Hopefully that will avoid too much surplus water at any one time, while still giving the plants enough water to avoid heat-stress. I'll see how that goes and make further adjustments as necessary.

jfriesne commented 2 years ago

Reducing the watering schedule appears to have addressed this issue.