It's a wet one here today. Oddly it has been raining more since water restrictions were announced.
Made it to the gym despite not being sure if it was a good idea or not. The parking lot at the gym tends to flood when it rains real hard as do some of the streets that I need to drive on to get there and my Vette tends to not do well in flooded streets. Plus my sinuses have been bothering me since yesterday afternoon and was worried about getting sick again. I did come home and fall asleep for a few hours which is very unusual for me.
Last night some friends came over to watch The L Word and Battlestar Galactica on my Tivo. One of them is a Pagan and carries rocks (she will correct me and tell me they are magic crystals) in her pocket. She let me hold one so I put it in the microwave along with the rice I was cooking. Wow did she get disturbed over me nuking her rock.
This morning I noticed that my sprinklers were on. I also noticed that my yard guy was trying to cut the grass in the rain which I found even odder then my sprinklers being on in the pouring rain but that doesn't get me cited by the cite for watering on a day I'm not suppose to.
I have a 1958 vintage irrigation system for my yard that gets its water from a well with a couple of upgrades. It is a real pain in the ass to reprogram to comply with the new water restrictions and the pump is way too loud to be coming on before 8 AM like the city says we have to do. Plus I'm only allowed to water on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday between 4 AM and 8 AM
My sprinkler system has two huge 110 volt water solenoids and a 110 volt control circuit for the pump's contactor. Some time ago the third water solenoid died and was replaced with a 24 volt solenoid as was the three mechanical timers that controlled the three zones. This meant adding some 24 volt relays to control the old 110 volt circuits. The housing from one of the old mechanical timers was used to house the relays and a Rain Bird digital timer was used to control everything.
Since the Rain Bird digital timer is a pain in the ass to program I've been thinking of replacing it with this X10 one since I already have a X10 system in my house controlling other stuff. I could also then add a rain sensor to this one.
I guess if the city bugs me to change the days my lawn is getting watered I'll change out the controller for the X10 one to make life easy on me as the city sorts out what days and what times we can water and I know from past times that this was done it gets changed constantly. I guess I'm hoping that it will continue raining a lot and the water restrictions will be forgotten about.
Still the pump is noisy and there is no way I'm going to have it come on before 8 AM like the city wants me to as it wakes me up so maybe I'll just go the real easy route, flip the pump's switch to off, and learn to enjoy a nice brown yard that doesn't get any water other then rain.
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