Baseline Systems BaseStation 3200 - Manual (Page 12)

BaseStation 3200 Advanced Irrigation Controller Manual
After you have identified the hydrozones in your landscaping, determine which irrigation zones are used to water
those hydrozones, and then put the irrigation zones into scheduling groups based on their common characteristics.
Within the scheduling group, designate the zone where the sensor is located to be the “primary” zone, and then
you set up the watering strategy for the scheduling group based on the readings from that sensor. You can link the
other zones in the scheduling group to the primary zone so they will be watered more or less relative to it. These
zones are called “linked” zones. For more information, refer to Linking Zones (Creating a Scheduling Group) on
page 45.
A scheduling group can include any zones that:
• Require irrigation on the same frequency (for example, on the same days)
• Have similar plant types (such as turf, shrubs, or flowers)
• Do not have excessive differences in sun or wind exposure
• Are irrigated with similar water application technologies (assuming zones meet the criteria above)
You can group spray, rotor, and multi-stream zones, as long as the difference in application rates is less than 10x.
You can also put drip zones into one group, and subsurface drip zones into another group.
Consider the following example of a sports park that has four baseball fields and four soccer fields in addition to
some perimeter and parking lot shrub areas.
The irrigation manager for the park wants to water the infield areas of the baseball fields differently from the
outfields. The manager puts the zones that water the infields of all four baseball diamonds into one scheduling
group that is controlled by a single soil moisture sensor in one of the infields.
Likewise, the manager puts all zones covering the outfields into a second scheduling group controlled by a single
moisture sensor in one of the outfields.
Because all the soccer fields have similar plant types and sun exposures, the irrigation manager can group all zones
for all the soccer fields together and control them with a single soil moisture sensor located in one of the fields.
Lastly, the irrigation manager breaks the parking lot and perimeter shrub beds into two scheduling groups
representing sunny and shady exposures.
In this way, the irrigation manager is able to configure 42 individual zones into 5 scheduling groups that are
controlled by 5 soil moisture sensors.
In the example above, the irrigation manager would configure the 5 scheduling groups for the Upper Limit or
Lower Limit watering strategy based on readings from the associated soil moisture sensors. However, each
scheduling group can be watered according to any watering strategy appropriate for that section of the landscape.
Choosing the Primary Zone for a Scheduling Group
Because the zones in a scheduling group are naturally similar, any zone in a group can make a good primary zone
(the zone where the sensor is located). For large scheduling groups, or scheduling groups with a higher level of
variation in sun or wind exposure, choose a primary zone that:
• Requires irrigation the most frequently
• Has an average or greater sun and wind exposure for the scheduling group
IMPORTANT NOTE! The primary zone must be configured in the BaseStation 3200 system at an address with a
lower number than the other zones within the same scheduling group. For example, if zones 1 – 50 are in one
scheduling group, zone 1 would be the primary zone. For retrofits, you may need to renumber your zones in order
to meet this requirement.
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