Customer Reviews

Orbit 62032 Yard Watering System

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

some of the reviews here are not phrased well, similar to the manual.

You can water 4 different sections of the yard separately, one-at-a-time (so no worries about low water pressure). The manual actually implies that you can't do this- it sounds as if all go on at once.

You can adjust duration of watering for each section separately, and program up to three repeat times per day to water (I don't find the last useful).

The main complaint is that the sections always get serially watered- first one, then two, etc- you can't skip a section if you want one on a different schedule.

I've had this thing up for 5 months now with no broken valves, and while it would be nice to be able to skip a section, I can limit watering times to work around it. I have not found an alternate device that will let me skip sections at will without going to an underground system.

A good-quality brass 4-hose connector is $15 at WalMart, let alone a garden store. For the price, it adds a huge capability and works well here.

FOLLOWUP: Worked great all summer, sits on the S face of the house full sun 95F, driving 4 hoses-- love it. Never changed batteries. Use good alkalines, not cheap ones.

If people are breaking valves perhaps check your water pressure, wells and some water districts markedly over (or under) pressure their systems, it is a big problem if you use equipment that notices the out-of-spec pressure.

As you will gather from the other reviews, this is not a fully programmable valve timing system. You cannot, for example, program one valve to turn on a lawn sprinkler once a week and another to turn on a drip watering system every day. You CAN pick what days of the week to water, whether once a day, every other day, etc., and how long each valve stays open, but whatever schedule you pick ALL the valves will turn on and off in sequence. This is a bit disappointing, as it makes it impossible to water one area once week, for example, and another area every day. This is a shame because I suspect this feature could be easily incorporated into the programming system. Perhaps Orbit thought to do so would make the programming too cubersome and complex with the compact controller it uses. Maybe so, but even with the options they do include, the programming system is unnecessarily complex and hard to understand. Further, the instruction manual appears to have been written by a four-year-old with attention-deficit disorder. A few examples keyed to "real world" watering needs would sure be helpful. Really, someone at Orbit needs to think this thing through much more carefully and do a redesign. Or perhaps they don't want it to compete with their more expensive underground sprinkler timers?

Still, once you do figure out how the things works, it does make for a very useful (if limited) automatic watering system. I bought two more valves so as to control four different systems, two going to lawn areas watered with sprinklers and two to hanging baskets and pots watered with a drip system. Since the baskets and pots have to be watered every day, then so do the two lawn areas--less than ideal, as I would prefer to water the lawn deeply once or twice a week. Still, I've managed to adjust the timing for each valve so the lawns receive the proper amount of water as well as the baskets. In our dry climate, this is an acceptable compromise, but it might not work as well in other areas where watering the lawn everyday would be very wasteful. Also, if all you want to do is water lawn areas, you won't have this problem.

In sum, I am happy with the product, though it took some sustained effort and thinking to get it to do what I wanted. I limit my rating to three stars in hopes that Orbit will get a clue and do a bit of R&D to improve the controller and to write a decent manual. This thing is almost a really great product. All it needs is a fully programmable controller!

We've owned this product for 4 years...each year adding more zones. We now water our entire outdoor flower and vegetable gardens with it, using a total of 4 controllers and 11 valves. In 4 years we've had 4 valve failures and one brass manifold failure.

The system has been incredible. Before we owned it there were constant battles, with ourselves, and our children to keep the garden watered. Invariably a section would be missed and plants would wilt. It is a huge relief to let this system take care of it for us.

The trick is to buy a drip irrigation system (I recommend Mr. Landscaper) and hook the system up to it. These systems come with about every kind of head you can imagine and some you didn't. In a few hours of laying hoses and putting in sprinkler heads you have a happy garden. It took us a couple weeks to refine the heads to optimize the watering, and each year you have to check for bad heads (they clog or break from foot traffic or squirrels who decide to taste them.)

I also recommend the tiny 1/4" dripper hose to be placed in pots. A couple inches of hose in each pot is all you need.

Pros:
1. There is no product out there to compete with this one yet...other than an updated system also from Orbit, or a full indoor controlled irrigation system, which would be considerably more expensive.
2. Can water 4 stations up to 4 times a day. Can pick a day of the week, every other day or every day for watering.
3. Batteries last an entire summer watering season. In fact, I've used last years batteries the following year.
4. Stations are very reliable. I've not had one fail.

Cons:
1. Valves do fail. We've lost 4 out of 11 in 4 years. However they aren't expensive at about $15 a piece. My only concern is that Orbit continues to provide them since they have redesigned this system this year and the new valves have a different connector.
2. Orbit changed the design this year. The new valves use a different connector with better sealing to the control unit. I've never had an issue with the old connectors, and I'm concerned they will obsolete this generation, requiring me to buy new stations.
3. Stations can not be programmed independently. That is to say that every station must run at every programming time, though you can program each station for different amounts of time. So, for example you can program your garden to water for 40 minutes, and your pots for 5.
4. Programming is on the level of some poorly documented VCR's. Once you get it figured out, it isn't such a big problem but I still find myself frustratingly pressing the wrong button and having to start over. The button sequences are confusing.

All in all I'd give the system a big thumbs up. Not perfect, but the best available at this time (though one should consider buying the newer sealed system if it isn't much more expensive because replacement parts might be easier to find in the future.)

It does do 4 hoses....with the purchase of extra valves...BUT it truely does NOT take care of 4 different stations that require different frequencey of watering. If you are only doing lawns or flower beds you are ok...but we have lawns AND flower beds AND,planter boxes. You can't have a "weds" program different from "saturday" program. Every day must be the same. It wouldn't have been that hard when they designed the chip to make it so that each station could have it's own program. Sorry going back to my Melnor....4 timers, one each hose... : (

I found one of these at my local hardware store a couple of months ago. I was going to be out of town for two weeks and I didn't want my plants to die. I just set this to water the flowers for 15 minutes a day and it just did it's thing. I didn't even have to install it (you can if you want but I'm renting) the spout holds the whole thing. It took me a few minutes to program the thing in the first place, but I'm not what you would call a computer whiz (in fact just the opposite) so I expected that. Now it's been four months and I still love it (the batteries haven't even been changed yet.) Well anyway, I'm ordering another for the other side of the house.

The level of functionality is a bit more than I needed but I purchased this timer because I liked the all-in-one packaging. Setting up the timer was a bit more complex than it should have been but the device did a fine job for a few weeks. Then the LCD screen started to lose some digits and became very difficult to read and control. Batteries were being used like crazy (3 AA's every two weeks) and some of the modes are now useless. Going to the trash...

I was reluctent to buy this product after reading reviews on Amazon.com both pro and con, however I went ahead and bought it figuring that a yard water system would water different places at different times. After receiving the product I too was confused about watering separate areas at separate times. A quick call to Smarthome tech support cleared up all my questions and system works great. I would like to give Smarthome customer service a 5 star rating for their help with this problem and others with warrenty coverage.
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I wish I had read reviews before purchasing this worthless piece of junk. I did manage to order another valve, but had to spend a lot of time finding one online, no retailer had them on the shelf. The concept is great, execution is horrible. As others have noted, there is no programming different valves to run on different schedules. If you set it to run Tuesday, all valves run on Tuesday. No way to set the lawn valve to run on Sun, Weds & Friday while your hedge or planters run only on Thursday. Battery life is atrocious. I had to replace the batteries constantly. Numbers would start to fail to display even with new batteries. Valves would open and then fail to shut at the end of the cycle - I watered my front lawn for 8 hours one Saturday because the valve failed to close and we had gone out to the fair for the day. This is one of those products that should have been so right but turns out to be soooo wrong. I'm buying single station controllers from DIG corp to replace the Orbit unit. Such a disappointment.

On the surface, this looked to be an ideal solution for controlling the three separate sprinklers that I need for my side and back yard. It quickly became apparent that there are some serious quality control issues with this kit.

Within a week of installing it one of the valves began to "sing." No water was flowing through it but it was resonating throughout the whole house. I called Orbit's customer service department and they sent out a replacement that arrived within about a week or so. A second valve has subsequently failed. The original 4-port manifold leaked badly and one of the ports wouldn't open, requiring me to replace it with a better-quality model.

What's worse, however, is the ridiculously short life I'm getting from the batteries. One set of three AA batteries will last only about 2 weeks. Upon replacement, I have to reprogram the entire system over from scratch. By contrast, the two-valve Melnor system that this device was to replace will give me two years' service from four AAs. I have no problem replacing batteries once or twice a growing season, but NOT every two weeks and especially not when it comes to having to re-program a complex watering program from scratch.

I will also echo the other complaints about not being able to program the individual valves for different days/times.

This doesn't sound like rocket science - to have a timed system that opens and closes 4 valves when you want them to open and close, yet nobody has successfully implemented it that I can find. I'm almost afraid to consider an irrigation system if timers are this unreliable.

Should have played safe and gone by the negative reviews of this product. But the concept of having one timer control 2 valves with the possibility of expanding to 4 valves appealed to me. Unfortunately one of the valves leaked and was defective. Also, the threaded hose connectors on the brass manifold come off too easily when removing a valve or a hose. The whole thing leaked badly. The DIG timer (model 9001D) is way much better in both design and quality. I installed two DIG timers on a plastic manifold from my local hardware store with no leaks whatsoever on the first try. And the DIG is much easier to program and use.