What A Load Of

Ahem...

So I've decided that, after this wet winter which banished the California mega-drought once and for all, I'd give my little postage stamp of lawn a little TLC. I switched the sprinklers off back in 2021 or so and the lawn basically shrivelled up and died.

It's bounced back a little since then, since grass never truly dies, but it could obviously use a little help. The chicken shit is one part of it, and the other part is giving it a nice hefty overseeding to get things fired up and growing again. The 12 bags should make for a nice 1/2 inch top dressing (though two of the bags will likely go up in the flower bed behind the short retaining wall, because the soil there is truly awful).

I'm also going to turn the sprinkler back on, which brings us to the next topic of discussion.

The sprinkler controller is in the comically oversized grey box at the top, and that little remote box below it is a "Solar Sync" controller. Basically it measures precipitation and sunshine to estimate the evapotranspiration, and uses that estimate to adjust the runtime of the sprinklers automatically.

Or at least it's supposed to. It's never worked since I moved in, and would gleefully let the lawn dry out during the heat of the summer, and soak it down with water in the winter just hours after a rain storm.

I tried poking around at it to try to figure out what's up, and eventually came to the realization that the problem with the Solar Sync box is that it exists.

This model of sprinkler controller has the Solar Sync function built-in. You're just supposed to buy the sensor without the controller and connect it directly to the main box. Luckily it's the same sensor, so I just yanked out the extra controller, wired in the sensor correctly, and for the first time since it was installed the system actually works properly as it was designed.

It really baffles me how someone can install an automatic sprinkler system like this, have it not work, and just shrug and live with it instead of fixing it.