How farm irrigation automation works
Farm irrigation automation puts a radio and a controller at the pump house, actuators on the valves, and a phone in the irrigator’s hand. The command is remote. The deadline to stop is stored on the device that is watering, so a lost signal is not permission to water all night.
The pieces at the pump house and in the field
1.Field hub
The field hub sits on a mast at the pump house, on power and on the farm’s internet. It is how commands reach the wireless valves. If it goes offline it cannot send a new command. Valves already running still have their timers, and they still close when that time is up.
2.Valves and pumps
Solar wireless valves thread onto existing risers. You claim one by scanning the code on the unit. Pumps, fertilizer injectors, a mainline meter, and any wired valves sit on the controller in the pump house. A manual open offers 15 min, 30 min, 1 h or 2 h. A schedule runs the minutes you set. Close and stop stay available.
3.Phone or browser
That is the screen: confirm an open, read a schedule, see an alert that names the thing to check. The same account can split control from read-only, so the office can see the water year without being able to open a valve.
A normal open, from the tap to the answer
You pick a valve or a field and choose how long it should run. The confirm sheet names the valve and the field, states the clock time it will shut itself off — including if the signal is lost — and tells you how the pump that feeds it fits in. You confirm. Until the valve answers, the status is Sending. Close is not disabled during that wait. Treating Sending as “already open” is how people walk away from a valve that never moved, or from one that moved and was never given a stop.
Pump start and stop sit with the valves, because a valve with no pressure is not an irrigation set. Zone sequences share the pump so two sets are not opened against a mainline that cannot carry both. Alerts name the next look: a wired valve with a zone meter, open 5 minutes or more with no flow, a field hub offline, a tank low. The note is in plain words.
Off the farm, and when the link drops
You can run it from the phone on the farm or away from it, as long as the phone has service and the field hub is online. If the hub drops, valves already open still shut on their own timers. The pump’s dead-man timer is in the hardware at the pump house and stops the pump when its run time is up, even with the link down. Emergency stop reaches every pump and injector the controller can still talk to. Anything out of contact still has its own run limit.
Remote control fails closed. Someone still chooses the duration and still walks the system when an alert says to. The phone does not replace the irrigator. The product pages are the farm irrigation controller and remote irrigation control.
What you can see while the set is running
Where the instruments are installed, flow, pressure, soil moisture, and tank level stay with the field they belong to. A mainline meter says what left the pump house. A valve with a flow reading says whether that set moved water. Pressure says whether the set is in the range the system was built for. None of those sensors invents the others. Metered water is totaled as metered. A run with no meter but an entered flow rate is counted and labeled estimated, and it is never shown as metered. Water with neither is “not measured,” left out of the totals, and never shown as zero.
A soil-moisture sensor can start a run when it reads below a level the farmer sets, on top of the clock schedule. It does not hold, skip, or interrupt a run that is already going. How that fits a season of sets is in the scheduling guide.
Questions
Does the valve open if it never hears the command?
An open the valve has not confirmed stays Sending. Close is still there. A queued command is not water that is already on.
What if someone opens the valve with the lever on the riser?
That open never received a run time. The auto-close timer is set when a remote open is accepted. A hand-opened valve is shut by hand.
Keep reading
RowCodes runs the set from the phone
RowCodes sends the command from the phone and leaves the shut-off on the valve and the pump. Log in to run a farm you already have. Installers use their own login for the site work.