Full Season Comparison of Weather Based Smart Controllers

摘要

Several weather based smart controllers at Berthoud, Colorado were programmed to manage six virtual landscape zones over the 2015-2016 seasons. These virtual landscape zones covered a wide variety of soil types, plant materials, and irrigation methodsbut were the same six landscapes given each controller. The zone valve control outputs on each controller were connected to switches/relays monitored by a data logger which recorded the minutes of runtime for every irrigation cycle of all six zones on each controller. Controller performance was obtained by importing these irrigation events into a daily soil moisture depletion/balance spreadsheet using the dual Kc method for calculating plant water use.