How to start pump before opening zones?

[JimS]

I have limited pressure and would like to start the pump before opening the zones to help pop up the sprinklers. I see at least one other request for this but at this point it appears that negative delays aren’t allowed. Short of getting a program update I am wondering if there is some other way to accomplish this. Will setting a station delay do this for all but the first zone by keeping the pump on during the delay?

[Ray]

I assume you only need to start the pump before the first zone in the program (or do you need to start the pump before every zone in a program)? If you only need to start the pump before the first zone, one solution is to define a dummy zone (it has to be a zone with the smallest index of all other zones: for example, if you have zone 1 as master zone, then use zone 2 as a dummy zone, and your real zones would start from 3 and so on). In a program, give the dummy zone desired amount of time so that it will be the first zone to start, and since it activates the master zone, it will keep the master zone running for that amount of time before moving to the next zone.

[JimS]

Ray,

I need to run the pump to build up pressure before each zone. See my later post here:

https://opensprinkler.com/forums/topic/station-delay-to-start-pump-before-zone/

[Ray]

Remove your defined master zone, then set it as a parallel zone (disable ‘sequential’ flag). Then set the station delay time to be the desired amount of time to build up pressure you need for the master zone.

In a program, schedule it for the total duration time as necessary, which sums up each zone’s run time plus each station delay time between two zones. That way, the master zone runs in parallel with the other zones, and lasts for the entire program run.

In the future, please try to post the same question in the same thread, instead of spreading them over multiple threads.

[wifi75]

this is a good workaround, but it is better ask new features on opensprinkler ?

[Ray]

This is going to require some changes to the way the scheduler works — the issue is that master zones are turned on dynamically on the fly, depending on whether any associated zone is on or not. It’s done this way to guarantee that at any time an associated zone is on, the master is on. For this reason, the master zone is not scheduled independently, but rather is scheduled dynamically on the fly. Since in general we can’t predict when a zone is going to be turned on (for example, a user can manually open a zone at any time), the master currently can only turn on simultaneously or after a zone is on, but not before.

I guess one solution to this is to delay the zone start time to achieve the same effect, For example, if someone wants zone 3 to turn on now and master to turn on 20 seconds before the zone, since we cannot go to the past to turn on master 20 seconds earlier, we can do it the other way around: turn on master now and then after 20 seconds turn on zone 3. Essentially this is postponing zone 3 by the desired delay time.

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