Watering Schedule - determining inches/week

Hi Rob,

We've been scratching our heads over this for a while. You've obviously spent more time on it and It looks good to me. Just curious. How close is your calculation to the ETWU for the year? I see that your calculations are tighter is some areas (like irr. efficiency for instance).

I's be interested to get Jake's input.

Question to you Rob: Do you regularly design to provide a coverage of over 100%?

Are you referring to MAWA vs ETWU?  We typically end up being close depending on the design style we're going for but will adjust the planting design so that the ETWU always falls within MAWA.

Yes, would like to get input from others.  I also think it would be great it LandFX had I calculator built into it where all you needed to do was input the ETo and it would figure this out.  I'd also imagine it could allow you to play with some of the variables such as the crop coefficient, etc.

Regarding your question of coverage over 100%, I'm assuming that you mean for overhead spray application?  We have our heads adjusted to show the radius at 90%.  Then, for the layout, we space them so that they are at head to head.  So, if they are operating at a full 100% radius in the field you will technically get grater than 100% coverage.  Hopefully this is what you're looking for as an answer....

Rob,

We do the exact same thing with regards to the 90% radius setting. And I really did mean ETWU. The MAWA is just a bar to meet. The ETWU is what you've actually designed. I would say that I'd compare it to your actual ETWU. Sometimes we fudge our ETWU to get as close to the MAWA as possible without going over. This is because some purveyors use the LA or Irrigation Designer's calculated ETWU for baseline billing (Irvine Ranch Water District (IRWD)for instance.) We found this out the hard way. I'd like to use the real numbers for the runtime calculator though. 

BTW, I agree with you wholeheartedly. The LandFX irrigation scheduler could be better. But I'm also sure that the wizards in charge of refining the LandFX irrigation module have been considering this advancement for a while, but there hasn't been a vocal demand for it. - Thanks for adding it to the LandFX forum. I'll be following this thread for sure.

By the way, did you notice the naked detail call-outs that can now be used as mtext in your drawings? There are so many applications for it. For instance in notes in your details or additional text that can be placed in our schedules that link to additional details. I think that this was a huge advancement. It's now like using <field> in WORD. It tracks the location of the detail no matter where you use it in your drawings. I hope that they release a new power tip soon on it (the last one was in 2014) so that more people will see the advantages of using this new, semi-unknown, tool.

Stay safe and sane.

Seaweed

Rob, what figure do you use for "irrigation efficiency?"  The DU of the zone in question?  

It depends on the type of irrigation.  Off to the right, the efficiencies for Drip (.90), Rotary Heads (.80), Rotors (.70), Spray (.60) and Bubblers (.85) are listed.

Thanks Rob.  I use similar figures. 

I'm of the opinion that DU should not be confused with efficiency.  DU is important, but all it takes is poor management to make a perfectly designed system inefficient.  

C'mon Jake. Voice up my friend. I really think that this is something that with your leadership LandFX could help us with. 

Bueller.....  Bueller......

Seaweed,

You think too much of me, my friend :)

This was next in the list to look at, but yet again, you beat me to the punch.

I will start with this- We just had a meeting yesterday about some up and coming improvements we would like to make to the Watering and Runtime schedule. Along with improving these reports, we hope to include additional MAWA, ETWU, WUCOLS (and any other acronym you can think of) data to the system so you can properly view your design to the plant requirements or restrictions you are being held to. Having said that, it is a HUGE undertaking as you might imagine, so we may be reaching out to your brilliant minds to see best approach in putting this together.

I, too, have put together a MAWA/ETWU calculator of sorts that I am happy to share/discuss with (any of) you offline if you would like.

Having said all this, the current workflow you are all describing seems to be the best and most flexible approach.

Yeah, would be great to see what you've some up with.  I've posted my spreadsheet, so...  I've showed you mine, now show me yours!

Here's my latest...

Hahaha! Fair enough. Keep in mind, it is specifically for the comparison of MAWA and ETWU (but I plan on building things out further). Blue shaded cells are places to enter data, there are expandable groups in certain areas for more data entry. Different tabs for summary, data entry, etc.

Like I said, for full capabilities, you are free to give me a call to chat about things further. :)

Jake, my friend (and irrigation routine wizard),

You are so helpful to the Irrigation Designer's community!

I haven't had time to review your spreadsheet yet, but expect it to be awesome.

It's great to hear that you and the other wizards at LandFX have been considering how to address this topic. LandFX is continually updating. We don't have to wait a year to get updates. That's one of the beauties of the subscription based business model that LandFX uses. So, having said that, we hope not to have to wait to see some of this included in near-future releases. For instance, some users are not  responsible for the planting designs. It may be a different firm performing that task (as you know we do both). So providing this information to the irrigation designers could be released in a format that would allow us (irrigation designers) to move forward with a release that may not pull information automatically from a planting design. We'd have to input it ourselves. Having said that, WOW, that will be cool when it does (if the plant designer includes the WUCOLS information). And wouldn't it be nice if they zoned their plants properly. Enough on that for now though. 

Again, I'm really happy that y'all have been working this out in parallel with what we've been needing and hoping for.

And ROB, Thanks for bringing this up again.

Tom, It's great to hear from you too. I'd love to hear from my friend Steve Baker on this (Independent Irrigation Consulting). He's a techhead too. And I'd like to hear from many other irrigation techheads.

This is one of the most exciting threads!~

I've noticed that many Irrigation Designers have customized their valve tags to include an attribute for the WUCOLS value of the plants being irrigated by that valve (Luis Cadmonkey Lugo Jr. has an excellent valve tag). LandFX could release a new standard tag that includes WUCOLS values and if the areas served are for trees or shrubs. Then maybe the data from this valve tag block could be imported into the routine. That the planting plan designer is out of the loop and allows the irrigation designer to input this information in one location that goes to this routine and also the valve schedule. In fact, I see the valve schedule growing in potential with the development of this watering schedule.

Maybe later on it first looks to see if the plant designer has added WUCOLS values, then if not goes to the valve tag block. I don't know. Just brainstorming after work here. 

Thanks for the mention, Steve. Yeah, many water purveyors require what we call 'extended' valve tags/callouts that have hydrozone info, operational PSI, and application/precipitation rate in addition to the typical info found on valve tags/callouts. Much of the extra info on these tags/callouts has to be manually entered but it's nice that the precip rate is a viable attribute tag since early 2018 so that's nice. You can find the relevant post and conversation here: https://www.landfx.com/community/1671-hydrozone-and-precipitation-rate-attributes-for-irrigation-valve-callouts.html

Anyway, we try to use the Land F/X watering schedule whenever possible and just set the in./week for the hottest month of the year (July), set that to be 100%, and then include 'global' adjustments for the other months as a percentage to adjust runtimes accordingly. But sometimes (much of the time) water purveyors want an exhaustive schedule that is broken down from yearly ETo into monthly and weekly runtimes and we typically use an Excel spreadsheet for this like most irrigation designers.

Something that I've been working on from time to time is creating a macro that, if correctly recorded, would convert the Land F/X Valve Schedule Excel Spreadsheet output into our Excel Watering Schedule with the click of a button, but time constraints and our preferred formatting has made that difficult. I've also started to see if the same could be done using the Land F/X Watering Schedule Spreadsheet output but still face many difficulties.

If more attribute tag options like the ones I listed above became viable attribute tags on valve tags/callouts, like the information shown on the Land F/X Valve Schedule and the Land F/X Watering Schedule, it could make it easier to generate Excel spreadsheets of watering schedules that are more detailed than the one currently available.

Thanks Luis (CadMonkey)! That's great input.

Jake, Maybe it's time for another taco night. Any reason for me. Ha, ha.