Maxicom is an irrigation central control system manufactured by Rainbird Corporation. It has been on the market for over 20 years and is still considered the benchmark against which competing products are compared. Maxicom is a combination of PC-based software housed at a central location that communicates, controls and monitors a myriad of hardware devices. The hardware devices can be for a single location or dozens of locations dispersed over a broad geographic area. This translates into a single Maxicom-enabled computer potentially controlling hundreds of irrigation devices.
There are a number of ways by which Maxicom can communicate to the irrigation devices:
*telelphone
*cellular modem
*spread spectrum radio (900MHz)
*direct cable connect
*radio (450-470 MHz)
*Ethernet device server
The versatility and robust nature of Maxicom makes it a great option for a variety of property types. Included among these are school districts, parks departments, office parks, corporate facilities, school districts, municipalities, cemeteries and housing developments.
The primary benefit offered by the Maxicom system is water savings. Saving water is most readily accomplished by using the system’s weather (ET) based scheduling capability. ET stands for evapotranspriation and is a value (inches or centimeters) that measures how much water is lost to evaporation and how much water is used by plants. ET goes up with warmer weather and lower with cooler weather. Watering plants based on their needs (which is driven by weather conditions) is what Maxicom excels at and pioneered years ago.
Maxicom can retrieve ET values on a daily basis from one or more weather stations. Maxicom pulls in these values and processes them into irrigation schedules and communicates the schedules to all irrigation devices. All of this is done automatically after the initial programming by the user. Water savings are best achieved if the irrigation sites can be closely aligned to weather stations that are within fairly close proximity.
From the single computer, or central control, a Maxicom user can generate vast water savings by scheduling, monitoring and controlling thousands of pieces of irrigation equipment at locations across the street or across the country. This control network originates from one point and branches out from there through the robust and varied communication network.
The Maxicom network from the central control first goes to cluster control units (CCU). Once CCUs receive irrigation schedules from central control, they then store, process and communicate those schedules to the irrigation controllers at the same site. The CCU-controller connections are usually through radio or a hard wire communication. Each CCU can individually control more than two dozen irrigation controllers.
As for the irrigation controllers, they can be connected up to two flow sensors each. The controllers can also be tied into other types of sensors, like wind, rain or freeze. Of course, each controller supplies power to the irrigation valves through which the water ultimately runs through.
So, let’s review how much stuff Maxicom can handle using a hypothetical example. One central control is connected to, say, three dozen CCUs. These CCUs are tied to an average of fourteen controllers each. Each controller has a flow sensor plugged into it and runs sixteen valves each. The equation for this: 1 (Maxicom computer) x 36 (CCUs) x 14 (irrigation controllers) x 16 (valves) = 8,064 valves. That is a lot of valves and, of course, a lot of water.
When properly programmed and managed, that ultimately results in a vast volume of saved water.
