Prior to the summer of 2004 I had timers on the sprinklers so they would only stay on for a short while after I turned them on.  The cheap little timers weren't accurate enough to only water 10 minutes so I usually ran them for 40-50 minutes just to make sure there was enough water regardless of the weather.  The irrigation system consisted of hoses buried in the decorative rock (permanent beauty bark) with a couple of impact heads and a couple of soaker hoses.  There were diverters to switch the water from head to head so once the timer expired on one head I had to switch the diverter to the next head.

Needless to say this was kind of tedious so I started to think about how it could be automated.  At the time I wasn't financially ready to install a complete irrigation system but I needed to automate this somehow.  All of the decent controls or valves are made to be permanently installed so I had to leave the hose diverter idea.  I also had to get the controls to at most two locations (one each for the back and front).  Since I was still going to use hoses rather than installed piping I would have to mount whatever solution I came up with to something.

The next task was the programming:  At the time Mary knew nothing of the weather and really doesn't have surfing abilities that I wanted to explore.