Sunday

 

Sunday morning walk to Hammock Park

The trail crosses Cedar Creek several times.

At 9:00 it was 70 degrees.

Highlander park playground across the creek from Hammock park.

Highlander Sprayground

In the afternoon, we went to the neighborhood Fall Fest at Lake Saundra.

Our new b-hyve sprinkler timer arrived at 5:00 p.m. We started installing it immediately. 

First, we unplugged our current timer.

We took a picture of the wiring and labeled each wire so that we'd know which wire went to which zone.

Then we removed the old timer box and drilled new holes for the new box.

Then we wired the new box.

Then we downloaded the app on my phone and let the phone app set the time and date. Then we set up a program similar to our previous program. We did everything from the app which is so much easier than doing it at the box. Then we tested it. It worked. It took a little over an hour, from start to finish. With the old system, every time we lost power, I had to manually set the time, month, date, year, and every single zone run time, start time, days to run, etc.

It rained while I was installing it, so I set a rain delay on the app (screen shot above). It tells me that the next watering is for Thursday at 7:00 a.m. Tomorrow, I'll take pictures of each zone while they are in test mode and enter the pictures in the program so we'll know which zone controls which sprinkler heads. We have six zones and a couple of them are not intuitive. The app will be helpful when troubleshooting sprinkler heads. I'll be able to test it and turn it off at the sprinkler without having to run back to the garage to turn it on and off.

Tomorrow, I'll remove the old rain sensor from the gutter and remove the wire that ran to the old box. We don't need a rain sensor with this unit since it connects to the nearest local weather station and ceases watering automatically if it's raining. We'll also get a new surge protector for the outlet to protect the new unit from electrical surges. A quick wall patch and some cleaning and we'll be ready for the sprinkler specialist to take a look at our valves and solenoids, which are all working, but probably not as well as they should.