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Previous: Ikea e-mail | Main | Next: London double decker bus seating sign
August 10, 2004 12:01 AM
Broken: Gardena watering timer
Dave Collins writes:
This is a watering timer. You plug your garden hose into it and it will turn on and off at regular intervals, watering your lawn. Ah, but *what* intervals?
This timer has 14 settings that combine both interval and duration. There is no correlation whatsoever between the 14 settings and the interval/duration of the waterings (the first 3 might be 5 minute waterings with 3 different intervals, the next 4 might be 10 minute waterings at 4 different intervals, etc.).
How do you set them? Check the manual.
You cannot operate this device without the manual in-hand. I have lost the manual. There is no way for me to set the timer to the setting I want. There is also no way to even know - once I've picked a setting - what it is doing (I could spend ten minutes watching it go on then off, so I'd know the duration, but I would have to wait as much as 8 hours to know the interval.)
This is mindboggingly stupid. Plus, I've seen a brilliant solution - one dial for frequency, one dial for duration. No manual, no guessing - and an additional bonus: no fixed settings, so I get to pick interval *independent* of duration.
A very good example of a broken design. Setting the duration and frequency of watering shouldn't require the memorisation of a manual.
Well, I understand the pressure to have only one knob: A second knob is more hardware and thus costs more. But surely, just printing the values like "5m/4h" instead of each dot would have been better.
hook it up & set it on 1 & see what it does,or send it to me & i will find out how it works or if it does work. thanks in advance for the timer....e-mail me for my address....
Setting | Interval | Duration
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
0 | Disabled | N/A
1 | 6 hours (4 times per day) | 3 minutes
2 | 12 hours (2 times per day) | 3 minutes
3 | 12 hours (2 times per day) | 15 minutes
4 | 24 hours (1 time per day) | 3 minutes
5 | 24 hours (1 time per day) | 5 minutes
6 | 24 hours (1 time per day) | 30 minutes
7 | 24 hours (1 time per day) | 1 hour
8 | 2 days | 5 minutes
9 | 2 days | 30 minutes
10 | 2 days | 1 hour
11 | 3 days | 30 minutes
12 | 3 days | 1 hour
13 | 7 days | 1 hour
14 | 7 days | 2 hours
This is just a clean-up and translation of the link posted by Mike above. I can't vouch for its accuracy, since I don't have one of these timers.
Randy
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Previous: Ikea e-mail | Main | Next: London double decker bus seating sign
I have one of the "nice" ones that let you set them independently and the damn thing loses its settings every few days and needs to be reprogrammed.
Not much better. :-)
(and no, the battery isn't dead....)
Posted by: Brad Fitzpatrick at August 10, 2004 12:46 AM