Program your home irrigation timer with your home computer
If you’re a typical homeowner, watering your lawn and plants involves a lot of guesswork. Programming your home irrigation system can be as difficult as programming your VCR. Chances are you’re just hoping you did it right.

The fact is, most people with irrigation systems water their yards inaccurately.  They are wasting water and not helping the plants as much as they might hope.  But, getting the most accurate and beneficial watering schedule is no easy task.  Experts suggest using Evapotranspiration rates, calculating landscape coefficients and knowing the root zone depth for each type of plant in the yard. Or, if you don’t have a science degree, you could take the low-tech approach: Run your sprinklers, time how long it takes for puddles to form on the ground and then guess how long they should run each week.

Never fear, technology is coming to the rescue. A new computer-based home irrigation timer is now available to do the thinking for you. Agricultural professionals have used computer-based systems for years, and now one manufacturer is bringing the technology to homeowners.

The first example of the new computer-based irrigation management systems to hit the market is the Toro ECXTRA suite. The ECXTRA suite is three separate components that work together to make creating a home watering schedule easy. The three pieces are the Scheduling Advisor Software, the Time Pod Transport module and the ECXTRA Timer.

The Scheduling Advisor is a software program you load on your home computer. It takes the whole irrigation scheduling headache and boils it down to a series of simple questions. Once the questions are filled out, your customized watering schedule pops up on the screen. If you see something you don’t like, such as a start time that is too late in the morning, you can easily correct it right from the schedule and the software adjusts all the other parameters to accommodate your changes.

Once the Scheduling Advisor software has created a customized schedule, the information is loaded into the Time Pod transport module. The Time Pod is essentially a portable memory drive that links the home computer to the ECXTRA Timer in the garage.  The Time Pod automatically transfers the irrigation schedule from the computer to the ECXTRA timer with the push of a single button.

The third and final component of this system is the ECXTRA timer itself - redesigned with new capabilities including battery-free backup protection and a seasonal adjust feature that lets the watering schedule adapt to changes in local weather, without the need for reprogramming.

The entire ECXTRA suite (Scheduling Advisor, Time Pod and ECXTRA timer) can be purchased together as a unit for around $99. Or, if you are not ready to “take the plunge” the ECXTRA timer can be purchased separately and used as a traditional stand-alone timer.

Look for the ECXTRA suite this spring, but be warned, once you try it you may never want to go back to the days of standing out in the yard watching puddles form.

Perry Vayo is a frequent writer on irrigation industry issues. His new book Scott’s Watering Systems will be available in spring 2005.