The Vigoro 3015V sprinkler timer is a single-zone outdoor unit which connects directly to your outdoor hose lines and has an option for a remote water sensor unit which is attached to a receiver.  The case is glued, or more likely ultrasonically welded closed around the internal components.

If you want to see large versions of these images just click on the image in the page you can use the << and >> button at the bottom of the image viewer to move between photos.

The first step in opening the case is to pull out my trusty craftsman moto-tool and cut carefully through the seam of the box. I wore safety glasses for this as hot plastic gets thrown all over the place.

I didn’t want to cut through the valves or through the plug for the water sensor receiver antenna, so I used a screwdriver just to pop the remaining edges of the seams.  It came apart pretty easily.

With that done we can now see the internals of the Vigoro 3015V sprinkler timer and get an idea for how they do things.  I’ve labeled the different components inside of the housing. You can see the battery terminals, Rain Sensor Antenna connector (mislabeled as ‘temp sensor’, the water valve and in the bottom of the shell you can see the ‘potted’ electronics section with the battery terminals going into it. The potting materials are usually an epoxy type material which is designed to completely seal the electronics and protect them from any moisture damage.

I disconnected the valve assembly for a closer look as seen in this next picture on the right hand side. The valve has a long barrel section which looks something like a rifle scope, and attached to the left hand side with the red and black wires is the drive motor and gearing.

Here’s a side view of the valve. You can see the drive motor a bit more clearly as well as the one of the gears that it moves. The gearing moves a pin in and out of the valve housing to start and stop the flow of water.

This picture below is the top view of the valve labeled and colored to show the high and low pressure side.  The high pressure side from the water inlet comes in from the right and co-axially surrounds the low pressure section which goes to the outlet.

I removed the motor from the valve and you can see a bunch more labels. Of note you can see the high and low pressure taps, and the return spring in the middle. When the pin slides out it connects the high pressure from the high pressure tap to the low pressure tap, causing the main high pressure to compress the spring and open the valve. A more detailed pictorial sequence is further down in this post.

This is the main valve drive motor for the Vigoro 3015V sprinkler timer. It consists of a small DC motor and a gear drive with a cam on it. as the motor rotates (rather quickly) it presses the pin in, or pulls the pin out.  When the pin is extended the pressure behind the valve diaphragm equalizes and the spring forces the diaphragm closed. When the pin slides out, the opposite happens.

Below is the valve body with the diaphragm removed. If you look at a large version of the photo you can see how there is an outer cavity where the high pressure water comes in from your home and then an inner cavity which is the low pressure/outlet side of the valve.

In the next 3 images you can see a diagram I drew of the valve in the Vigoro 3015V.  This is the sequence of the valve opening.  Closing the valve works in reverse.

I hope this helps anyone who was curious about how these valves work. There is a gate, but it’s very small and basically acts as a hydraulic switch to operate a larger hydraulically operated valve. It’s kind of neat for me as I’ve always wondered how these things work, and it took me a little bit to figure out how the thing worked. I was expecting to see a large gate with a motor that open and closed it.  I think the Orbit valves may work like this, and I am going to be dis-assembling one of my spare valves from my Orbit Sprinkler Timer at some point this week.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments or corrections by filling in the comment form at the bottom of the page.

The plan is to lay out the general design of the sidewalk with string or spray paint, remove the existing blue stone that is there and start digging with the shovel and pick axe.  It’s going to be a lot of work because the ground as usual is pretty rocky.  As an added bonus the driveway used to go in front of the house.  When they decided to cover it up they didn’t remove the existing gravel, they just put a thin coat of topsoil on top of it.  this is why there is a driveway sized area across the front of the house and lawn where the grass barely grows at all and there are mostly broad leaf weeds, even after trying to kill them in the spring and planting new seed.  It looks terrible and will be partially resolved in September once the weather cools back down and I can plant more grass seed.

I’ll post some progress pictures of the work tomorrow afternoon, hopefully there will be some progress. I want to have a concrete sidewalk in soon, particularly while it’s still good concrete weather.  It’s impossible to run the snow-blower over the blue stone pieces that are/were there without shreading the lawn.  Someone came and picked up some of the blue stone already and I guess the rest will just go into the pile in the back.

Turn the PatchMaster into part of your lawn as soon as possible because the chances are the rest of your lawn may look terrible compared to the patch. Have no fear, over time it will blend in.  Before you know it you will want to patch your whole lawn so it looks as good as the patched spot but this would a bad idea, and very expensive.  I know this sounds like an ad placement or promotion, but I’m not paid by nor endorsed by Scott’s to promote their lawn care products (aside from occasional advertising through an ad network).  My true feelings is that a) the mulch material (paper) could be better filtered for plastics and other things b) if it’s watered it really does grow up quickly c) it usually looks better than the rest of your lawn and c) money well spent, so far!

YOU HAVE TO KEEP IT WET! This is critical or your PatchMaster will fail and your lawn will end up on FailBlog.  Additionally, you need to have good loose soil for the roots to grow into.  Heavy clay soil, or heavy rock soil may pose a problem to you. If you have either of those I recommend getting a pick axe and shovel and breaking up your soil (watch for water/sewer lines, check your basement for where they exit and use COMMON SENSE).  Remove rocky/nasty soil or screen it to get rid of the rocks and debris and add sand/composted manure/topsoil if needed to turn it into decent soil. There are numerous sites dedicated to improving the condition of your soil, I have not written about that as of yet.

In the area in the photos below I added new topsoil to fill in a hole in the lawn. The soil is untreated with chemicals and all natural. It worked out great and I’m sure you can find similar materials local to you or make them from stuff from the local garden shop, Lowe’s, or Home Depot.

Anyway, enough from me, here are the photos of Scott’s PatchMaster at 63 days, slighty over 2 months.

I like to imagine little people moved into my lawn overnight and made little mushroom homes, you can see some of them are clustered like little mushroom palaces, and then just some stand alone ones here and there. Perhaps I need to find more exciting hobbies…

I thought this was pretty bizarre that the mushrooms had only grown where we put down the new topsoil to fill in some low spots before we re-seeded the area.  I called the topsoil place and the guy there said that it was pretty common with their soil since they don’t treat the soil with any chemicals.  He said it’s due mostly to all of the moisture and rain we’ve been having lately and once we got a few hot days they’d pop off. He said you can mow them down and the next day they’ll be right back.

After doing some reading it seems like there are a few other ways to get rid of mushrooms.  Some favorites are golf clubs, like a pitching wedge.  Go out and get some practice in!  Alternately you can lime your soil, adjusting the PH to the proper levels or use chemicals.  Personally they don’t bug me, and are a sign of nutritious soil for plants and lawns.  It’s only when they start to grow in a ring pattern that you may have a problem.  This is called a Fairy Ring.  Apparently the mushrooms grow on the outer edges of the Fairy Ring, so the circle gets larger and larger.  When the fungus in the ground is this large it can start to steal nutrients from your lawn, instead of help it. No Fairy Ring in my lawn, so I’m doubly okay with it.

When I checked later this afternoon they had all been fried by the sun and not a thing was left standing!

I’m suspecting that these mushrooms will come back overnight again since the humidity is pretty high.  It’s actually pretty cool that they can grow back so quickly!  I’m going to try and get some photos tomorrow morning as well if they’ve come back. This is a neat surprise I never expected, I tend to find that out a lot with owning a house.  Some of the surprises aren’t really that neat, like the ants, or the giant spider, and I’m sure other things I’ve yet to find. But yes, it’s a mix of good and bad.  May life bring you all more mushrooms than ants or spiders!

UPDATE: It’s been a couple of weeks and the weather has turned hotter, though we stil have thundestroms  in the evening.  The shrooms have mostly gone to the great mushroom heaven in the sky and we don’t see much of them. Give nature a chance, folks. Enjoy the mushrooms while they last, cause next week it’ll be a giant man eating spider…

We will be over-seeding the lawn in September sometime, or possibly just ripping it out and seeding from scratch.  I still haven’t decided which is a better way to go.  Ripping out the old lawn and laying new seed would definitely be in order since this old lawn has been here for years upon years, and I don’t think there’s much that could make it look good or feel young again. It is certainly a lot more work though, and I would need to bring in more topsoil for some more spots where it’s thin over the rock base.

The gutters on the house are in terrible shape.  The one you’ll see in the video is a newer one, but it was not put in properly.  There should be a drop in height of the gutter from the non-downspout side to the downspout side, I think whoever did this one just put it in along the edge and went ‘good!’.

You can see the gallons of water pouring out over the edge of the gutters and even at the downspout end of the gutter, although some of the plants in the planter seem to benefit from it.  It needs to be repaired to get the water away from the house though, the sump pump has been working overtime to keep things dry in the basement.

I think it’s kind of odd that the water is pouring out from the downspout end of the gutter.  I’m guessing it’s plugged with leaves or something, I’ll probably have to get up there with the ladder on Saturday and see what’s really going on with it.

Also near the end of the video you can see where the blue stone pavers have been pulled up in preparation for the placement of a new concrete sidewalk.  I found someone in the area who was working on a stone wall and they called up and helped me get rid of this bluestone.  I still have some big bluestone curb and slab pieces sitting around, so if you’re in the mid-hudson area and interested let me know.

Anyways, here’s the video, just click and it’ll pop up in a little viewer window, you will not exit the site.

There’s a few changes coming to the Thaltech.com website, it won’t affect this blog for the most part, but is part of me wanting to unify all of my various hobbies into something easily manageable and searchable.

I’ve started updating some of the other pages on this website. My most visited site, my current Jon’s Homebuilt Lasers , is slowly being transistioned over to Jon’s Commercial, Industrial and Homebuilt Lasers which will me in the format of a new CMS / Blogging style which closely mirrors the appearance of this site. I plan on getting some things going with that hobby in a month or two and wanted a site which was easy to update, as well as I am interested in merging appearance and access on my websites.

Also in transition at this time is my current Jon’s  Helis website. I also be converting my rocket site over as well as creating a new one specifically for my high voltage projects and experiments.

When all is said and done I will replace the main Thaltech Webpage with a blog type interface as well which will recieve general ‘stuff’ type posts and also receive updates from each of the partitioned sites. This will allow me to have all of my projects and work and hobbies and such indexed on the main URL for my website, providing for my own little gateway into things.

You may ask why I’d want to make everything completely separate, rather than just running one giant blog.  For one I want to individually theme each site towards people who have interest in those specific items, without them having to dig through a ton of unrelated content.  Additionally I like to keep things segmented for my own purposes.

I only got one picture of the patch, but it turned out blurry as it was late at night. I will try to update with a newer photo on Monday or Tuesday if you’re interested in seeing how 4 weeks looks (Update: Good photos at the bottom of this post!) .  It looks a lot like the last photos in the 21 day post just a lot more dense than before.  Also, it’s very green and makes the rest of the lawn look terrible (but it really is).  Hopefully we will get to overseed or cut out the ‘original’ lawn and get some new fresh grass going there, rather than clover,  once summer breaks.

I’m a bit concerned about the peninsula lawn which was seeded from scratch.  The new grass there has not grown a lot, if at all, since last week and looks kind of odd and lighter colored.  The new grass in other sections I planted from scratch has grown great, several inches a week and they received exactly the same treatments and similar exposure to rain and sunshine. The soil in those areas is of a much different quality, not sandy at all.   The soil on the peninsula is very sandy, so much so we tilled in about 15 bales of peat moss to the 1800 square feet area to try and help it retain moisture and nutrients, and on top of that we’ve had huge amount of rain recently. It’s possible that the rain is just washing the nutrients out of the soil.  We put a small amount of fertilizer on Saturday, about 1/4 the amount of a normal fertilizing, to see how the grass responded.  The last two nights, though, we’ve gotten long(hours and hours) torrential downpours once again.  I’m not sure what to do here but I will have to do some reading to find out whats going on.

I’m hoping it’s not that the soil is draining -too- well and letting the nutrients wash out.  I’m not sure of a good solution to that other than ripping up the lawn again in fall, mixing in good quality soil with the sandy soil and then replanting the whole thing, which would be a major pain in the neck.

It’s going to be a busy week, but I’ll try to get some new posts in.  I’m in the process of converting my Laser and Helicopter websites over to word press and wordpressifying all the existing pages.  Once that is done I will also be putting a high voltage blog online.  I’m really happy with this system as it makes it so easy to update and modify pages and doing so has given me the urge to get back into my other hobbies!

If you’re looking for Scott’s PatchMaster information please see all my PatchMaster Related Posts

Vigoro  3015V Water Timer / Sprinkler Timer

We ended up going with some garden / home improvement store variety water timers that you just hook your hose to.  The first one we purchased was a ‘Vigoro Model 3015v” branded item which had a lot of programming flexibility, manual override and, in this package, the moisture sensor. The water timer without the sensor function is $24.95 at home depot. It is pictured below.

Overall this seemed like a pretty good timer. It has a lot of flexibility in the programming schedule. You set the current time (in hours only) and set the start time (in hours only). You then program how often the timer will open the valve in hours or days to water your lawn, and for how long it will do it each time, in minutes, or hours.

We used this unit at first on four oscillating fan type sprinklers. I noticed right away that the water pressure to the sprinklers was very low when they were ran and series (VALVE –> SPRINKLER –> SPRINKLER –> SPRINKLER –> LAST SPRINKLER) type setup. I bought a 4 way splitter valve and then split the hose 4 ways to the 4 separate sprinklers. This evened out the pressure much better (and is called a parallel configuration)

While the water pressure had improved with the 4-way hose splitter, but it was still weak, this of course is not the sprinkler timers fault but just additional useful information.

The water sensor does a reasonable job, and lets you set how sensitive is.  The setting varies from 1 water drop to 3 water drops to tell the system how wet you want your ground. If the moisture sensor detects that your lawn is wet, to the level you selected, the main unit will bypass any sprinkling times until your lawn dries out enough to require watering again.

Special Note: Attach your hose to this unit before attaching the wireless receiving antenna.  It is much more difficult to get the hose on when the antennas is attached! (You’re welcome!)

Model: Vigoro 3015V  Water Timer / Sprinkler Timer w/Wireless Moisture Sensor
Cost: $24.95 (excluding moisture sensor feature)
Pros: Simple to setup, manual override, reliable, easy to read.
Cons: Splits hours evenly.  a 6/noon/6 schedule is not possible, you only get a midnight/6/noon/6 schedule, and I didn’t want to water our lawn at midnight and I didn’t want to water too early in the morning, or too late at night like I could achieve with an 3 x 8hr schedule.
Note: They do make a 2 zone programmable timer with more features for another 15 dollars.  So while this model wasn’t optimal for us, the other one may be an improvement. Additionally, this is a re-branded Orbit product.

Orbit 4 Zone Water Timer / Sprinkler Timer

After messing with the Vigoro module and having the water pressure problems as well as the ‘watering at midnight’ problem as well with that unit I decided to go to Lowe’s and see what they had in the way of a timer with multiple zones. Well, there wasn’t a lot available other than this Orbit ‘Complete Yard Watering Kit’. In all honestly it didn’t come with the 300 feet of hose or 5 25 dollar sprinklers But it did come with a 4 way valve manifold, the timer module and 2 electronic valves, expandable to 4 (additional valves are 12.95, mail order only from Lowe’s site).

This timer seems pretty well built, and it’s pretty easy to setup. It is somewhat the same parameters as the Vigoro module above with the addition of individual zones.  As an added bonus, they seemed to know you did not want to water your lawn at midnight, and it allows you to set a schedule for 6am, Noon and 6pm, and to skip any overnight watering possibilities.  GOOD IDEA!

With the addition of multiple valves, you have multiple sprinkler zones. I split the sprinklers down into 2 watering zones for the main peninsula lawn and set the timer to run both sets of control valves, one at a time, for 20 minutes during each watering period for the new lawn. It works great and reliably.

I like this timer much better, but it has it’s own problems as well. While the programmable portion of the timer is pretty great. The fact that you have to buy additional zone valves via mail order only is kind of a lame, but not impassable barrier. Additionally in manual mode it would have been a nice feature to be able to set individual times for each zone. With this module you can turn on one sprinkler zone for X minutes.  Or alternately you can turn on all zones for X minutes. You cannot set Zone 1 for 10 minutes, Zone 2 for 20 minutes, Zone 3 for 10 minutes, etc.

Model: Orbit Complete Yard Watering Kit (Model #: 91591)
Cost: No longer available, cheaper version now available for around $49
Pros: Very flexible timing options and multiple zones. Expands up to 4 valves and is reliable. While discontinued the additional valves are still currently available.
Cons: You can only buy sprinkler zone control valves through mail-order. This product has apparently been replaced by the 27908 model for $48.97 which seems of lower quality and construction, though it has a lower profile as well.

Summary

I wasted so much time and money with these stupid sprinkler timers we might have been better off trenching and putting in my own sprinkler system. By the time we got everything taken care of working right, the amount of money spent on sprinklers, hoses, timers, watering at weird hours, etc could have just been resolved with a real sprinkler system with a multi-zone timer for a couple hundred more. If you’re not able to do your own sprinkler system installation, then these may be the way to go, if you’re just being lazy you’ll regret it. Perhaps next year, things are working okay for now but not optimal.

If you liked this article, please see my other Lawn Related Posts and also my new article where I disassemble the Vigoro 3015v to see how the valve works.

There are quite a few different patch ‘solutions’ out there for fixing holes in lawns and trying to make them blend.  The advantages that a lot of these have over ‘plain’ seed is that they include some kind of recycled paper mulch to help retain water and keep the seed wet.   When you first put down grass seed it must remain constantly.  If the seed starts to germinate, and then dries out, it will die.   With these patch mixes, the mulch or paper will help retain the water, and it will also help keep the soil from drying out beneath it.   However, there is no patch mix that will work if you completely neglect it.  We mowed the patch to about 3 inches after the 21 days.

If you remember, I put the patch on about May 18th, so up to today, June 7th, that gives us a total of 21 days now that it has been ‘doing it’s thing’.   Click on the photos below, when they open up you can use the arrows to move back and forth through them.   Each photo is titled with the date and day number information.

If you’re looking for Scott’s PatchMaster information please see all my PatchMaster Related Posts

Well, we went out today and low and behold, there are now grass chutes popping up all over the place over there, so within a week it should be looking pretty green as long as it stays wet. The area has been getting water twice a day, but could probably use it 3 times a day, I’m just always running short on time in the mornings.  So even with less than perfect attention, it’s sprouting.  Check out the photos.  I’ll continue updating as things progress. Total time to sprouts was ~7.5 days.

If you’re looking for Scott’s PatchMaster information please see all my PatchMaster Related Posts

I’ve been a bit slow this week in uploading photos and updates on the new patch I put on the lawn on monday, 7 days ago.   The PatchMaster hasn’t sprouted up grass yet, but it should go in the next few days if all goes well and things should start to turn green.  I bought the 15 pound bag for around $25 to patch this area and some others.

There’s some thunderstorms moving in as I type so the lawns have been getting plenty of water.   There’s also a pick of the backyard lawn which we leveled and then planted seed with the use of a wood fiber germinating mat.  The areas that grew in seem to be doing well, but unfortunately there seem to be good size patches which just never sprouted, and I’m not sure why.   I mowed over that mat once, most of it stayed in place.  I suspect we’ll have to put more seed down once the summer is over.

The big lawn project however, on the peninsula is doing well as you can see in that photo (with the 4 sprinklers, next to the barn).   I trimmed back our Eastern Red Cedar on the peninsula (which is actually a juniper – Juniperus virginiana) so now it is not hanging on the ground.  You can see the before picture, with the moss ‘lawn area’  in the forground, and the after picture with the now grassy lawn in the foreground. It looks a lot better being opened up like that and will make mowing a bit easier.   I also want to cut back some branches from the acorn tree which are hanging over the front of the barn.

I also added a couple photo’s of a plant that I’m not familiar with. (Update: They appear to be Peonies)  It has these big red buds at the top of the stem which have not opened up yet, I guess it’s still doing something in there before it bursts forth.   There are a lot of tiny ants all over these buds that seem to be paying a lot of attention to them though.   Either they’re waiting for what’s inside, or there’s some sort of plant juices they like there.

Hopefully in a week there will be sprouts and in short time there will be lawn.  I love how this stuff works, but it really really makes me want to build a home-owner sized hydro-seeder over the summer.

You can flip through the photos and see the stages from:  Topsoil -> Crushing up the compressed quickpatch -> applied quickpatch -> watered quickpatch.

Oh please! contain your excitement, don’t crowd.  The pics are as exciting as watching grass grow, but I’ll take photo’s twice a week and provide a post in about 2 months with all of the ‘progress’ photos together so you can see the lawn sprout, become infested with weeds, and then get razed with a large blowtorch!

Sorry about pics being out of order, my image viewer app plugin is a dimwit.

The lawn on the back yard hill is growing in okay, I was hoping it would have been thicker but that doesn’t seem to be the case.   If I could have gotten this or the peninsula to grow in as fast and thick as that Scott’s quick patch (PatchMaster(tm)) stuff I’d have been happy.   Maybe I need to look into hydro-seeding for any future lawn work ( DIY Hydro-seeder anyone? ) .    The Scott’s quick patch is basically hydro-seeding ingredients minus the water from what I saw on the bag.   I saw a spot down the road where the town had cut up some big 8-12 foot wide swaths of land to do fire hydrant work, then hydroseeded when done.   That was 2 weeks ago and the grass is already growing really fast there.

I also have some more photos of the Iris flowers.  The second one looks like it’s sticking it’s tongue out   Say ahhhh!

Additionally are the photo’s of something special brewing in ‘Mom’s Sunshine Garden’  I was worried they weren’t going to come up, but they bloomed fairly quick.  It appears something has been nibbling them, but with the number of bunnies I’ve seen around here, I hope it’s them and not bugs!

And finally you can see a couple of herbs from the garden planter.  The first one is Sage and the second one is Parsley.

My mom identified the flowers for me, they’re Iris flowers and maybe Crocus or Snap Dragon.  Up until 30 minutes ago I just called them ‘flowers’ !   I’ll have more photos in the next few days as more bloom which should help ID things better.   I looked at pictures of Iris’ and both flowers look similar so I’m thinking they’re just Iris.  Time will tell *suspense music*.  Feel free to post suggestions.

Here’s an interesting website I found for the Iris Species Database provided by The Species Iris Group of North America

As you can see in the pic of the other side yard, it hasn’t been taken care of yet, I’ll probably work on raking out the dead wild violet roots, filling in the holes and sunken spots this week evenings and put some grass seed down.   I’ve started to cut back on watering of the peninsula lawn, I want to force the grass to start extending it’s roots down into the soil so that it will hopefully be decently established by the time our smoldering summer comes along.

Images are now clickable for full size (from this post onward)

Here’s the view from ‘street side’ look back into the back yard.

New topsoil on the back yard areas that had huge huge dips in them.

Here’s a view of the same area looking from the barn towards the planter.

Shot from the back yard by the barn to the planter.

Here’s how it looks with the mat installed.

Back yard fill with seed germination mat

New Sidewalk — The back yard was getting very muddy to walk between the back door and the driveway so we solved the problem by using some pavers and a retaining wall.   It was a tremendous amount of work, I believe the soil is 60%+ rock in this area which makes for much labor.

Walkway work

The Back .40:  This is the back yard of the property, beyond the ‘developed zone’.  It’s  probably closer to .60 acre, but I like the ‘back 40′ comparison better.

Back woods area at the end of March '09

Mom’s planter, we gave the planter a special name for my Mom and I’m going to be sending her photo’s from time to time so she can see what I planted in there for her.  It should be quite nice if all goes well! Notice how the lawn looks in this photo.

I planning on growing something nice for my mom in here each year, this years special ingredient is.... stay tuned

Barn side yard – If you look at the ground in this phot the ground color is all moss growing there on the surface.  This tree is kind of nice(it is still in winter mode) but I plan on trimming the bottom branches a bit so it’ll be nice and open instead of ground cover.

Just one of the pine-type trees in the front yard, I need to get a photo gallery together for identifying different trees and plants in the yard.