@Mike That rainbird clock requires 110 a.c. A quick check on their battery units shows them to be less flexible than DIG units. @Twolips It has several problems: Simple does not equal quick. 1. It assumes that once you set it, you want to do the same thing every day. Or every other day. Which means I have to remember to go and turn it OFF after it runs. 2. To set the start time, you have to press and hold the + or - button until the time shows. The run time moves 1 minute per press. So, for example: I want to run one sprinkler for 2 hours starting at 1:00 p.m today. So I have to change the start time to 1:00 p.m. Now I have to change the run time to 2 hours. Later on, with my overhead system, I want to run it for 4 hours starting at midnight. So now I have to chagne the start time by 11 hours, and change the run time by two hours. This is my life: I am running 2-3 sprinklers 16-24 hours per day during the warmer times of the year. If it was the same every day, it would be easy to automate, but every day is different. The willows take more water than the spruce. -- longer run time. The maples are in a narrow strip, so I focus the sprinkler (gotta love the aquazoom for this feature) and water for a shorter period. It rained a quarter inch last night. Reduce all the water times today by 30%. Wind is up. Can't use sprinklers today. So I'll run the drip irrigation and flood irrigation. Cool today. Use shorter cycles. Hot today. Sprinklers in the morning and evening, drip during the heat to avoid evaporation. Getting behind. Run the overhead antelco's on the deciduous strip (1/20 inch per hour) all night. Tomorrow I'll spot water the larger ones. Right now I use mechanical timers because they work. Set the sprinkler, walk away. It turns off. But that means I have to come back to the trees every two hours to set the next zone up. It takes 50 sprinkler moves/ drip zone connects to water everything. Usually I'm running 2 or 3 at a time, so that means on the average 20-25 trips to the pot yard to play with hoses. This means if I'm potting up, I have to stop what I'm doing, go over to the pot yard. fiddle with sprinklers, walk back to the potting table, and resume work. It means that if I sit down to supper at quarter to six, I have to leave at 5 to 6 to go set spriniklers. And again at 8. And again at 10. When it's warm and I can't keep up, I set an alarm for midnight, and set again, then get up at 5:30. *** A controller that could remember a bunch of programs might work. I could likely reduce most of my stuff to two, perhaps 3 start times per hose bib, and 3 run times per bib. That would give me 9 programs. It would also need a feature, 'run this program ONCE then stop.' The easy answer is to drill another well, put a larger breaker on the transformer. At 30 gpm, I could run 8-12 sprinklers at once. That answer is easy, but it's not cheap. 30 gpm means a 2 horse pump which means upgrading the breaker at the pole from 35 amps to 70 amps, which costs $40 per month. Or I could put a tank large enough to handle all the water my well can produce in a day (At 5 gpm, that's around 8000 gpd) then use a gasoline powered pump to actually irrigate. 10,000 gallon tanks aren't cheap either. Or I could pump into a dugout (cheaper than tanks) but then I'd need to have some pretty elaborate filtering to keep the drippers happy.

My gardens are all drip irrigated, and it's the best thing I did while planning them! My supplies came from Dripworks, who have great customer service and design assistance. Unfortunately, no one but you can answer your question. It all depends on the roses, the weather, your soil, your emitters, your water pressure ... I could go on and on. For some sort of guidelines, let's use my front hybrid tea bed as an example. I have clay loam soil, mulched beds, half-inch supply lines, and one adjustable Shrubbler emitter on each of the 80 roses in that garden. I don't know exactly how much water each of them gets, but running the system for 2 hours whenever it's been dry seems to be enough. I use a simple manual rotary timer on the hose to shut off the water after 2 hours. All of my lines run on top of the ground, but below the mulch. The only part of the system that's visible are the emitters. Hope this helps, Connie

What kind of soils do you have and how large are your roses? Even my enormous climbers are fine being watered twice a week for 20 minutes in sandy loam. We water for the plants that need the least water and use multiple emitters for the plants that need more water. So if most of your garden would be fine with 15 minutes 3 days a week, you can put two emitters on a big climber you want to have more water (tho I find climbers have massive root systems and are fine with the regular schedule, so that's a bad example). Newly planted plants need to be watered three or four times a week with less water until they are established. You can literally see them transform when they are ready to switch down to a regular schedule. One thing you cannot do with low flow irrigation is give your roses a good deep soaking before fertilizing them in the summer. Also- you really do need to check that you aren't drowning individual plants or producing runoff once you settle on a schedule. Three times a week is a lot of watering. Tests have shown that people are far worse at gauging whether their plants need water than scientific measurements based on evapotranspiration rates and season, even without soil moisture tests. What I'm saying is that it's easy and very normal to overwater.

Cycler, I'm having the same issues. I don't think turning down the screw on the sprinkler valve is an ultimate solution, because in my case the sprinkler valve is actually starting to leak. I have two valves that are emitting a small stream of water from the place where a big plastic screw can be turned to reduce the flow. I'm going to have to put in an inline pressure reducer before it goes to all the valves to be sure I don't damage any more valves. In my case, it's easy to do this, because I installed my connection to the pressurized irrigation system. I ran a pipe up the side of my garage and attached it to the existing sprinkler system after cutting off the line that went to the culinary water. I'll just have to dig up a piece by the garage and put the pressure reducer in. I hope I can get the right balance of enough pressure to keep the sprinklers shooting as far as they need to go and enough reduction to protect from leaks. I also hope I don't have any hidden leaks underground somewhere in a pipe joint. In the next few years, I expect my city to start metering the irrigation water, and I don't want to find out I'm using way too much (and have to pay way too much!) because of a leak I didn't know about.