Customer Reviews

Melnor 3020 2-Cycle Electronic Micro Water Hose Timer

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I have lots of beds around my house. I do very little overhead watering, and I have soaker hoses, and hoses running to remote soaker hoses, all over my yard. I have quick disconnects everywhere, and I can start watering any bed I want immediately.

But I have two problems that I needed to solve. One was that I tended to forget I had started watering something, and the other is that after a tour of the yard, I may want to water everything at once. Both of those problems are solved with a timer.

While I haven't tried every timer, I've tried a few. There are simple count-down timers that only time how long (or how much water) you put on, but cannot be set to start later. They're cheap, and they only solve one of my problems.

This timer has some limitations on how you can set your schedules. It keeps track of how much time has passed, but it doesn't have a clock. You tell it how far in the future you want the first cycle to begin, and it works from that point. The first cycle can be set to be one-time only, or to repeat every 1, 2 or 3 days. A second cycle can be set to start after the first time the first cycle runs, again with the same options.

The first cycle cannot be set to start more than 12 hours after programming. Thus is you want the water to come on at 5am, you can't set it any earlier than 5pm.

Once you have the schedules set, there is no way to tell what the schedule is. If you are in doubt, you may need to reset it, and start over.

On the other hand, I have a different, less expensive timer that I like better. That timer only has one schedule, but has more options of how often it is repeated, as little as every couple of hours, or up to a full week. On that timer, I also set the time of day. This means I can set it up to 23 hours in advance. It also means that I don't have to count how many times I press a button to make it start at 5am. I simply choose 5am on the dial. I find that timer meets my needs better than this one.

I would submit to you that unless you have a small yard that can be considered only a single zone, you will want more than one timer. You may also not realize which features you like best until you actually try them.

If two distict watering schedules for the same zone works for you, this may be the right timer for you. On the other hand, I found a less expensive single-schedule timer that better fit my needs.

Ultimately I put this timer on the drip irrigation zone that includes my tomato and pepper garden. I anticipate freqently changing the schedule, and I will be freqently watering this plot. So it matters less that the repeat function choices are only every 1, 2 or 3 days, and I don't have to worry about resetting the clock each time I change the schedule.

I doubt that I'll be buying more of this timer, but that's not to say it's a bad timer. It's just not the right one for the way I use timers.

I have a .42 acre yard and have owned 4 of these timers. All four broke within a year. I did not abuse them (brought them inside in winter, took out the batteries, etc.)

They have a new model (cylindrical shape) and 2/4 of these have broken within the first year.

Extremely frustrating waste of time. Avoid these electronic timers.

It does the job but is not intuitive. You'll never know exactly when the system will turn on since there is no clock to set. It is based on relative time, like `it will start x amount of hours from now'.

This is a superb product. I have four units and have subjected all to heavy use for five years. This is the workhorse of the garden (s). One finally stopped and I am buying two more. I am most impressed with the quality (especially of the well-fitting plastics) and the simplicity(simple things work). This product should get an award for design excellence. Be careful not to use sharp objects (like a screwdriver) to operate the buttons, otherwise you may eventually damage the plastic membrane sealing the buttons.

Have had this unit 3 or 4 years now (actually, my wife says it may be 5 or 6 years, and she may be right). Always bring it in in the late fall and remove the batteries. It's never failed me or had a problem.

After waiting an amazingly long time for shipping, I finally received my crushed package. Luckily there was a lot of padding around the timer and it didn't look damaged at all. After inserting the batteries as shown and screwing the back on, this paper weight did absolutely nothing. Pressing buttons should cause a beeping sound according to the manual - I got no beeping sound and following instructions for setting it up did not get it to do anything. I though maybe they mislabeled the way the batteries were supposed to go, so I tried flipping them around. This made the timer sound like a motor was running inside for about 15 seconds before the motor sound slowly died away (like a remote control car running out of juice). The buttons still made no beeping sound and the light on the front would not light up. So, I thought maybe my batteries were bad. I tried 14 different batteries from 3 different companies both in the direction shown and backwards and could not get this POS to do anything. Now I get to pay even more money to ship it back? I'm just going to home depot or lowe's instead of dealing with slow shipping and defective products on amazon again.

I would not recommend this. From the moment I first put batteries in it all it would do was open and close the valve over and over and then would beep a bunch and then repeat opening and closing the valve. I was very irritated that it didn't work since I was going out of town the next day and needed my garden to be watered while away. So I had to go waste my time packing it up and taking it to the post office to return it to Amazon. But of course Amazon was great with return and refund. I went to Wal-Mart and bought the one and only timer that they carry and it has worked great for what I need. (so far...but at least it works!) It was also $10.00 cheaper than this one.

So far, I've had this for a couple of months and it has been reliable. It could be a lot better, though. First, the programming is complicated and not intuitive. There is no way to tell what program you've created, so you have to reset it and start over if you want to make sure. Also, there should be something to indicated whether you've turned the program on or off--you have to turn it off if you want to open the valve for any reason, like using the hose for another purpose. Then, you have to turn the program on again if you want it to be active, but there's no simple way to look and see if the program is on or off. One other issue--if your city is on a weekly water schedule, this timer can't be programmed that way. The only options for watering are daily, every other day, and every three days.

Good timer, but would like to be able to use less water time than the 15 or more minutes required by this unit.

I was looking for a timer that would run for 8 to 10 hours for my horse mister. This one will run for 4 hours twice. There is no readout so that you know it is doing th right thing, but it is very easy to use and it does what I need. So, for the money, I'm happy...