Hi Guys
This is a little project i have been meaning to do for a while now and finally got round to doing it..
I keep a handful of pigeons and one chore i struggle with is changing the water.. So i decided to try and automate the process...Since my small loft is located in the vegie garden area and i have some spare zones on my vegie irrigation controller i decided to connect the water trough valves to it...
I purchased 2 standard 24vac sprinkler valves ,one for Filling (adjustable flow control) and the other for the drain valve (no flow control) ....Ran a 13mm hose ,1 fig 8 and a spare 4 core security cable from the vegie controller to the entry point at the loft...Mounted the Fill valve on the vegie controller stand...Connected it all up and then did some testing.....Fill valve worked fine but no go on the drain valve..It appears that those bog standard domestic sprinkler valves require water pressure to open them?? and the water to the drain is basically gravity fed.. At this stage i thought the project was doomed...Luckily i remembered that i had an industrial grade 24vac valve which i purchased earlier when i thought i had issues with one of my valves...
Installed the new valve and it worked a treat ,although the drain flow is much slower than i expected so that changed the way i intended to program the control of the valves in xPL....
I created a recurring event in xPL which operats the drain valve in the early morning for 3 minutes...Then 15 minutes later another recurring event operates the Drain valve for 40 seconds and the Fill valve for 1 minute....Another 2 recurring events occur in the evening which repeats the above sequence...The valves are programmed to operate in multiples of minutes but using a new xPL app (xPL-Timer) i was able to set the valve on duration in seconds by triggering the timer at the same time as the valve and then clearing the valve queue once the timer expired.......
So another project finished thanks to xPL...Heres a couple of pics of the install kit......
http://s195.photobucket.com/albums/z38/fra...WATER%20TROUGH/
Frank
This is a little project i have been meaning to do for a while now and finally got round to doing it..
I keep a handful of pigeons and one chore i struggle with is changing the water.. So i decided to try and automate the process...Since my small loft is located in the vegie garden area and i have some spare zones on my vegie irrigation controller i decided to connect the water trough valves to it...
I purchased 2 standard 24vac sprinkler valves ,one for Filling (adjustable flow control) and the other for the drain valve (no flow control) ....Ran a 13mm hose ,1 fig 8 and a spare 4 core security cable from the vegie controller to the entry point at the loft...Mounted the Fill valve on the vegie controller stand...Connected it all up and then did some testing.....Fill valve worked fine but no go on the drain valve..It appears that those bog standard domestic sprinkler valves require water pressure to open them?? and the water to the drain is basically gravity fed.. At this stage i thought the project was doomed...Luckily i remembered that i had an industrial grade 24vac valve which i purchased earlier when i thought i had issues with one of my valves...
Installed the new valve and it worked a treat ,although the drain flow is much slower than i expected so that changed the way i intended to program the control of the valves in xPL....
I created a recurring event in xPL which operats the drain valve in the early morning for 3 minutes...Then 15 minutes later another recurring event operates the Drain valve for 40 seconds and the Fill valve for 1 minute....Another 2 recurring events occur in the evening which repeats the above sequence...The valves are programmed to operate in multiples of minutes but using a new xPL app (xPL-Timer) i was able to set the valve on duration in seconds by triggering the timer at the same time as the valve and then clearing the valve queue once the timer expired.......
So another project finished thanks to xPL...Heres a couple of pics of the install kit......
http://s195.photobucket.com/albums/z38/fra...WATER%20TROUGH/
Frank
