Manual Control for winterizing blowout?

[brockp]

I see in some old screenshots that there was a zone manual control, I don’t see this in current firmware. This will be my first year with the opensprinkler and need to blowout my system.

With my old ezflora I would open a zone from my app, they would start the compressor and then I would just step through the zones one at a time. This way a zone was always open so it was never closed and pressure was never applied with all zones closed.

How do people do this for opensprinkler? For now I created a disabled program that holds each zone open for 1 minute, and the first for 2 (to get compressor started) and the last for 15 (so it never closes before the compressor ends. This does force the blowout people to wait the full minute rather than telling me ‘start the next zone’ because if I start a zone it’s queued, and if I stop a zone it doesn’t start right away it waits for it’s queued time form the time I told it to open. Thus risk to the system during the blowout.

My biggest worry is having all zones closed with compressor air applied.

How do others handle this?

[Ray]

There is an option called ‘station delay time’. You can set it to negative to allow an overlap between two consecutive zones. This hopefully can help achieve what you want.

[brockp]

Thanks neat idea, probably not required? The old system if I hit zone 2 when zone 1 was running it just switched and didn’t cause issues. I looked into what you suggested. Looks like it’s a global option not something that can be set as an override for that program.

In general is there no way to just manually control each zone but skip over the queued start time? True manual control over each zone?

Is what I’m doing making a small manual program, doing a few minutes for each zone, how people do blowouts? Or is there another best practice?

I don’t know is it safe to run a lot of air through a zone well beyond what’s needed just in case to ensure all water gets out, but now I have to wait for the program to just do it’s thing to avoid closing the valves under full air pressure?

I can’t be the only person using this where it snows 🙂

[Ray]

If you want the old type of manual control, you can achieve that by setting all zones to the ‘parallel group’, that way, you can activate any zone at any time and they won’t be serialized.

[Author]

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