What's up my friends? Today we're back and we're talking about wiring a sprinkler system
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
And it's a good story. But today we're going to show you the wiring that we're doing
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
What I've done is I have run valves to a whole bunch of different sections of this huge garden
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
in a lot of like little backyards and suburban neighborhoods they'll put all the valves in one box
But I've run sprinkler wire everywhere. You can see I did it while we ran the sprinkler pipe
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
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
It powers itself and powers the whole brains of the whole system
So that'll be coming here in this video as well. So for this system right now we have nine valves
We put a valve out here. This one feeds all of the trees and it's going to be number one
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
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
as we hook up all the wires and then later when we need to program it
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
Doesn't get much better than that. Okay so then I've got my control box
This is on the outside of this unit here because well it's in an enclosed box
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
The white ones just go here where the white goes and the color ones just plug in to the associated number
So yellow was valve number one so I've got it in spot number one
And when it's time to program the unit station number one will be whichever wire whichever valve goes to whichever wire
So station number one for me will be that valve that waters the trees
And like I said before we're going to kind of work our way clockwise around the garden
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
I'll just keep that same pattern so it's always easy to remember which valve goes to which
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
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
to be able to get water to a sprinkler system. So instead I went the lazy route that actually gives us another benefit
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
And this panel if we come inside the box and it's the reason for the box here
this panel runs through a little charge controller and that charges this battery
I actually had an extra car battery for my Suburban and this is gonna hold plenty of power
So even if it needs to run at night even if it needs to run when it's been cloudy for a week
it's got more than enough power. And then coming off the battery it runs to this inverter
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
But this is taking the DC power from a 12 volt battery and giving me this 110 volt outlet
So I can actually take just a regular plug and plug it in here and turn it on
and it's going to power our sprinkler system from all the way out here
Now the benefits of this are as you can tell one I didn't have to run power all the way from the house
But two it's an off-grid system that's not dependent on the utilities which I love right
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
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
Make sure you check out that other video to see how we did that too