Irrigation is the system that most often fails quietly: a blocked line, a stuck valve or a leak does damage long before anyone notices. Good irrigation control is mostly zone design, scheduling and monitoring.
Choose the method per crop
- Drip: delivers water and nutrients at the root with high efficiency and dry foliage. The default for most benches and beds.
- Overhead sprinklers: cover large areas and help with cooling, but wet foliage raises disease risk.
- Mist and fog: for propagation and hardening, where leaf-surface humidity matters more than root-zone water.
Design in zones
A zone is a group of emitters with similar crop, substrate and pressure needs, run by one valve. Mixing crops with different demands in one zone guarantees that one of them is wrong. Size mains and laterals so every emitter gets its design pressure, and fit filters where the water source needs them.
Schedule by what the plant needs
- Time-based: simple and predictable, but blind to the weather.
- Radiation-based: irrigate after a set amount of accumulated light, because transpiration follows sunlight.
- Substrate-moisture-based: start a run when a calibrated sensor falls below a threshold.
Monitor, do not assume
- A flow meter on each zone catches blocked emitters (flow too low) and leaks or broken lines (flow too high).
- Pressure sensing shows pump and filter problems.
- Run-off volume and EC show whether the root zone is being flushed properly.
- Protection logic stops a pump that runs dry and caps the maximum run time of every valve.
Fertigation
When nutrients are injected into the irrigation water, EC and pH are controlled at the source from stock tanks, with a recipe per growth stage. We recommend starting new fertigation in advisory mode and switching to automatic only after sensors are calibrated and the system has been commissioned.
Our greenhouse service includes our own sprinkler and irrigation control hardware and the software that schedules and monitors it. Continue with VPD in a greenhouse.