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Irrigation Software addTIMER

There are many ways to operate irrigation valves. You can turn them on and off manually. You can connect to each valve a little timer device. You can run an extremely sophisticated irrigation software, taking all potentially important parameters into account, from reservoir level to pipeline pressure, from pump load, temperature and balancing to soil moisture, weather forecast, ETo and even site inclination. And then there is the golden middle, compromising between very simple and very complex.

Soil Moisture Monitoring
Evapotranspiration         
Irrigation Monitoring       
Remote Valve Control    
Irrigation Management   

Getting one’s irrigation right is not an easy task. Many different parameters need to be well balanced throughout the season, and since nature isn’t static, neither are crops nor the weather. Whichever settings you choose to start off into your irrigation season, will have to be modified quite frequently as season progresses.

Irrigation valves are usually well dispersed over large areas, so remote control from the comfort of your office is quite useful. Some of these valves will have to be activated simultaneously, some consecutively – so it would help if the software allows both.

As the season progresses and the crops grow, their water requirements change. The irrigation software must provide an effortless way of adjusting runtime without having to modify every single valve.

The same applies when sudden, unexpected rainfall waters your crops well, and the entire irrigation cycle can be saved. In this case, a remote OFF command needs to be sent to interrupt or cancel all ongoing irrigation.

Given all these challenges it sure is important to choose the right software to take care of these tasks – ADCON has the answer!

The ADCON addTIMER is an extension that seamlessly integrates into our SCADA package addVANTAGE Pro. It can also be operated through a web browser and largely uses the same style user interface as the other addVANTAGE Pro extensions. It works best with the ADCON A724 addSWITCH, but can certainly be used to turn digital ports on all other ADCON RTUs on and off as well.

addTIMER offers a vast array of options to schedule your irrigation:

  • Set the start and end dates of your irrigation schedules for the season.
  • Set valve runtimes
  • Define an irrigation schedule for a day, and repeat it every day, every other day, or on certain days of the week.
  • Extend an irrigation schedule by simply adding a multiplication factor. Example: enter Factor 1.1, and all runtimes will be extended by 10%.
  • Repeat an irrigation cycle multiple times per day by setting an interval.
  • Insert a single irrigation cycle at any time

Adding or removing valves to or from a shift and see what’s happening:
Once you have set your various irrigation shifts you add valves to each shift (or remove them). An overview window will list all valves from a given shift and display their current status: red = closed; green = open; yellow = irrigation set, but not yet communicated to the controller.

Manual override
addTIMER still hands you the freedom to overwrite all settings you made - simply click the ON or OFF button and change the valves' status at any time.

Overview of shifts
As soon as you have defined all shifts and schedules you can find them all in a single, comprehensive overview window. Again, colour codes will indicate if a shift is active, stopped or on standby.

In this window, you can overwrite the irrigation schedule with a mouse click and start a new shift or end it prematurely. If you would like to extend the shift by a few minutes just key in a percentage factor, e.g. plus 10%. At harvest or prior to seeding simply set your shift to deactivated and reactivate it when the time has come.

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