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What's up my friends? Today we're back and we're talking about wiring a sprinkler system
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Now if you want to know why the heck we're talking about sprinklers, I've got a video you got to go check out. It's the whole story
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And it's a good story. But today we're going to show you the wiring that we're doing
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So this is a little bit more tutorial style. I've got to start out by talking a little bit about sort of the philosophy here
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What I've done is I have run valves to a whole bunch of different sections of this huge garden
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But because I put the valves all around I had to run wires to each individual one. Now normally you do have to run wires to all the valves but
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in a lot of like little backyards and suburban neighborhoods they'll put all the valves in one box
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But I've run sprinkler wire everywhere. You can see I did it while we ran the sprinkler pipe
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So that's all in and I have pipe running to all the valve boxes. Today I want to walk you through kind of the setup and why we put the valve boxes where we did
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But also I'm going to walk you through how to wire up one of those and then show you our cool setup that we have here that is a self-contained unit
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It powers itself and powers the whole brains of the whole system
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So that'll be coming here in this video as well. So for this system right now we have nine valves
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We put a valve out here. This one feeds all of the trees and it's going to be number one
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But as we move kind of clockwise around the garden there's a valve over here and another one over here and it's just
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going to move sort of clockwise and then go down that line. And we're going to go in that order with our valve numbering so that it's really easy
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as we hook up all the wires and then later when we need to program it
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to know exactly which valve goes with which number. Almost can't make that easier to wire. You just shove them in from the bottom
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Doesn't get much better than that. Okay so then I've got my control box
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This is on the outside of this unit here because well it's in an enclosed box
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that's literally made for being able to be outside. All of my wires from all the valves are all coming into this one box
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The white ones just go here where the white goes and the color ones just plug in to the associated number
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So yellow was valve number one so I've got it in spot number one
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And when it's time to program the unit station number one will be whichever wire whichever valve goes to whichever wire
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So station number one for me will be that valve that waters the trees
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And like I said before we're going to kind of work our way clockwise around the garden
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So in the future I actually have a few more spots and I let the wire run all the way down there so I could add future valves
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I'll just keep that same pattern so it's always easy to remember which valve goes to which
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because honestly like nobody remembers this stuff. All right so here was the other problem that I had when I started dreaming up doing this for my dad
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And that is that we don't have power run all the way out here and I didn't want to run a trench all the way from the house and put it in a new circuit just
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to be able to get water to a sprinkler system. So instead I went the lazy route that actually gives us another benefit
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I came up with this entirely like self-contained self-powered unit. It's run by a single 100 watt solar panel which is gonna be more than enough power
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And this panel if we come inside the box and it's the reason for the box here
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this panel runs through a little charge controller and that charges this battery
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I actually had an extra car battery for my Suburban and this is gonna hold plenty of power
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So even if it needs to run at night even if it needs to run when it's been cloudy for a week
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it's got more than enough power. And then coming off the battery it runs to this inverter
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This is just like the kind of inverter you would put like in your car to be able to power it off of like the DC power in your car
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But this is taking the DC power from a 12 volt battery and giving me this 110 volt outlet
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So I can actually take just a regular plug and plug it in here and turn it on
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and it's going to power our sprinkler system from all the way out here
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Now the benefits of this are as you can tell one I didn't have to run power all the way from the house
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But two it's an off-grid system that's not dependent on the utilities which I love right
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Self-reliance is all about not having to depend on everybody else. So now we can run our system that depends on the irrigation district
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without having to depend on the power company. But as we talked about in another video we don't even have to depend on the irrigation district
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Make sure you check out that other video to see how we did that too
