Adventures in irrigation

Utah is so dry that we must rely on some sort of irrigation, especially if you grow a vegetable garden or want to get grass, flowers or bushes established. When we built our home in 2014, we choose to have an automatic irrigation system to jump-start our landscaping, even though we lived one third of our time in Park City without relying on one of these water guzzlers!

The programming controller we used is the X-Core made by Hunter Industries. It is highly sophisticated, allows for a multitude of programming options, but is woefully difficult to understand and adjust, to the point that the company has a full-time crew of technicians at their call-center ready to guide users into their convoluted product. It's clearly a case of a product designed by engineers with absolutely no regards towards the end-user.

As you might guess, I've resorted to that call-center on multiple occasion ever since our system has been up and running, which means that I know it pretty darn well. This said, it still happened to start inadvertently around midnight when I'm sound asleep; the noise wakes me up and forces me to get up and shut the controller down.

I've called the support team many times about their product erratic behavior. They told me to do a “soft reset”, I also did hard ones, but the problem kept propping up. Finally I called again yesterday, went through my controller with the factory technician and when all was said and done, he asked me to look for the assembly date, printed on some obscure corner of the control panel. I told him what it was and he said “The units made during that time have all been recalled and you must change yours.”

Since we are talking about a $100-150 piece of equipment, I must now drive one hour away to get a replacement, waste half a day of my precious time and that's about my sole expeditious option if I want this problem out of my life sooner than later. Another adventure in consumerism and a very, very bad grade for Hunter Industries!