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Thinking about this differently today. The problem I am having is making sure my power supply can comfortably handle all of the in-rush current to each solenoid when multiple zones activate simultaneously.
Rather than me trying to micromanage this by using offsets, what if we simply added a small (maybe 100ms) sleep between when opensprinkler activates a zone? This allows inrush current to pass before a new zone opens up, and would otherwise by imperceptible from the user experience.
Putting it behind a flag like “Power Supply In-rush Protection” would be fine, but honestly I think this is probably a good feature to have anyway, especially since anyone using a master pump is always turning on at least 2 zones at once.
Hello, Ray.
I’m one of those people who want to run 3-4 zones at once. (well, 3 sprinkler zones and 1 start relay).
The inrush current issue is one of the reasons why I commented on this post: https://opensprinkler.com/forums/topic/fresh-install-unable-to-save-the-station-handling-station-delay-setting/#post-76340
By staggering the zones 1 second apart it helps with the inrush current and should theoretically allow us to run more zones at once. The current limit of 5-second minimums starts to lose some efficiency. I also don’t like to start my master pump and run it for 5 seconds into a closed system because it’s quite powerful. I just need a 1-second head start to build up a tiny bit of pressure.
Any chance we can set a minimum for stagger time of something closer to 1 second for zones even if they run in parallel?
In terms of stations, ideally, we could create “logical zones”. For example put zone 1, 2, 3 into logical zone “front yard”, zones 4,5,6 into “backyard” and then take actions on that zone as if it were a single zone, such as starting a master pump or running things in parallel, or adding it to a schedule.
That way we can keep our programs nice and tidy but have better granular control of parallel zones.
