Baseline Systems BaseStation 3200 V12 - Manual (Page 10)

BaseStation 3200 Advanced Irrigation Controller Manual
How to Use Soil Moisture Sensors Successfully
The first key for success with soil moisture sensors is to consider the hydrozones that exist in your
landscaping. A hydrozone is a grouping of plants that have similar water usage and delivery
characteristics and can be watered the same. For example, each of the following landscaping areas
is a separate hydrozone:
• Grass in full sun with rotors
• Grass in full sun with sprays
• Drip zones in full sun
• Grass in shade with rotors
• Grass in shade with sprays
• Drip zones in shade
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
42.
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.
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