Baseline Systems BaseStation 1000 - Manual (Page 10)

BaseStation 1000 Irrigation Controller Manual
How to Use Soil Moisture Sensors Successfully
The first key for success with soil moisture sensors is to identify the hydrozones that exist in your
landscaping. A hydrozone is a grouping of plants that have similar water usage and delivery
characteristics and can be watered the same. For example, each of the following landscaping areas
is a separate hydrozone:
• Grass in full sun with rotors
• Grass in full sun with sprays
• Drip zones in full sun
• Grass in shade with rotors
• Grass in shade with sprays
• Drip zones in shade
With a BaseStation 1000 (base model), you can install up to 10 soil moisture sensors, and then you
associate each sensor with a program.
In order to get the most benefit from your soil moisture sensors, Baseline recommends that you
identify the hydrozones in your landscaping, determine which irrigation zones are used to water
those hydrozones, and then consider how you can “group” the irrigation zones based on their
common characteristics.
Note: In the BaseStation 1000, you group zones by setting up runtimes for the related zones in a
single program. Then make sure that those zones do not have runtimes in any other programs.
Refer to Setting Up Zone Runtimes for a Program on page 39.
For example, you can group zones that:
• Require irrigation on the same frequency (for example, on the same days)
• Have similar plant types (such as zones that water turf, shrubs, or trees)
• Do not have excessive differences in sun or wind exposure
• Are irrigated with similar water application technologies (assuming zones meet the criteria
above)
You can group spray, rotor, and multi-stream zones, as long as the application rate varies less
than 10%. You can also put drip zones into one group, and subsurface drip zones into another
group.
After you have grouped your zones, install one soil moisture sensor in a representative area for
each group.
Consider the following example of a sports park that has four baseball fields and four soccer fields
in addition to some perimeter and parking lot shrub areas.
The irrigation manager for the park wants to water the infield areas of the baseball fields
differently from the outfields. The manager puts the zones that water the infields of all four
baseball diamonds into one program that is monitored by a single soil moisture sensor in one of the
infields.
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