June 29, 2021

Skip Orth:
Hi, this is Skip Orth again with Father and Son Pest and Lawn Solutions. And today I want to talk about how to set an analog sprinkler timer. A lot of people come to the Emerald Coast and they never had a sprinkler system before. Florida has a great natural resource here called our aquifer and we're able to tap into that relatively easily and use that water to irrigate our lawns with. Most other parts of the country doesn't have that great resource. So a lot of times people will come here and have never seen a sprinkler timer before. So I just want to go over the basics on how to set an analog sprinkler time.

Skip Orth:
So this is an analog sprinkler timer. And as you can see, there's two dials here in the timer, a large dial and a small dial. And the large dial represents the time of day. It takes 24 hours for this dial to make one rotation. And you can see the numbers on here that represent the time of day. And this small dial represents the days of the week. So there's 14 different positions on this little dial, 14 pins and each pen represents one day of the week. So 14 pins, that would be two weeks worth of time. And the way this works is is if you want the sprinkler system to come on on a particular day, you push the pin in like this. If you want it to skip the day you pull the pin out.

Skip Orth:
So let's say if I wanted it to water on this day, I would push this pin in like that. Or if I wanted it to skip this day that's that's in, I would pull the pin out. So if the pin is pulled out, it's going to skip the day. If it's pushed in, it's going to water that day. Now, as far as this dial is concerned, these pins that are removable, they're little white plastic pins. Each little pin represents 15 minutes of runtime.

Skip Orth:
So if I have three pins in a group together, that's 45 minutes that the sprinkler system is going to run. And then it's going to shut off, which is important because as I said, this component it will not switch zones until the pump turns off and turns back on. So the way these pins are set up, these pins are set up so it'll run for 45 minutes and then shut off for 15 minutes. And there's two pins here, so we'll run for 30 minutes and then shut off for 15 minutes. And then there's one, two, three, four, five pens here. So that's an hour and 15 minutes of runtime. It'll run and then shut off again until it comes around the next day.

Skip Orth:
So these, you can move these pins around the dial two and put them wherever you want them to be as far as what time you want the sprinkler system to run. So right now the earliest, the first zone is set to come on at 6:00 AM. Let's just say I wanted to move that and have it come on at 4:00 AM. I can move these pins over here and put in the pins at 4:00 AM. Now there's a big gap here. There's about a 45-minute gap. I don't want that gap there. I would rather have it just turn off for 15 minutes rather than for like an hour or 45 minutes. So I can pull these pins out and just move them over like that and so on and group them together so that they'll come on at a different time. Sometimes they're a little hard to get out of there like so.

Skip Orth:
Now, the other feature of this dial, actually there's two other features. One is the switch. This is a three position switch. So right now it's in the off position. If I were to turn it in the on position, then if this were hooked up to a pump, the pump would automatically turn on. And if I wanted to manually rotate through the zones, I would turn it on, let it run for a minute or however long that I wanted to look at that zone running and then I would turn it off, and I would wait probably about 30 to 60 seconds. Let the pressure go down.

Skip Orth:
And then once the pressure went down, this component would change zones and then I would turn it back on again. So if I want to go through different zones in my sprinkler system, turn it on, turn it off, wait, turn it on, turn it off, wait. That's how I manually go through the zones on this type of system. Now, if I have it in the auto position, there's a little switch right here. And if the pin is pushed in for the day that I'm on and the dial comes around. And once the dial comes around and these pins hit this little switch, it turns it on and it turns on the pump. So this switch right here is actually what makes the pump turn off and on.

Skip Orth:
And as you can see as I move it around, if this were running there would be three pins here, it would run, it would take 45 minutes for the dial to come around and then the switch would turn off. And then it would keep coming and it would turn on again. And it would run for 45 minutes and then would turn off again and so forth until it got to the next set of pins, off and then come around and turn off until it went all the way around 24 hours later and came on again. So that is how we set a pin and dial timer.

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