Gardena Automatic Water Distributor – Multi-Colou

First and foremost, this does work, and it works fairly well, but it’s not perfect. I don’t think it has been sufficiently tested with only a subset of the outlets being used, and if you set it up as intended, you can end up with the mechanism seizing up.

Under normal operation, when you disconnect the water supply (via timer, or manually) the water pressure inside will drop and the spring-loaded mechanism will trigger a rotation to the next outlet. When you turn the supply back on, pressure will be restored and water will come out of that outlet until you next disconnect the supply and repeat the process.

At least, in theory.

I use only 3 of the possible 6 outlets, and sometimes (for whatever reason) it rotates onto one of the outlets that I do not have enabled. As I had capped off the unused outlets per the instructions, the pressure would not release, and therefore the spring-loaded mechanism would never rotate to the next outlet. There is a button for manual rotation, but good luck pressing it. I’ve never managed to push it in when the mechanism is pressurised. The only thing I could do was gently unscrew the cap on the wrongly selected outlet until the pressure dissipated and caused rotation to the next desired outlet.

The workaround here is to simply not cap off any of the outlets, and run hoses from all of them, with the “unused” outlets running to a convenient drainage point.

Considering the price, and that rotating between outlets is literally the only thing this product exists for, you would think it would cope a bit better and be more robust/reliable.

Overall, it’s fine assuming you either want to use all of the outlets, or are happy to drain off the unused ones. Frankly, there’s no realistic alternative apart from maintaining a pressurised system with lots of timer/smart valves which are only activated one at a time, which would be more expensive and annoying to administer.

“”When she was good, she was very, very good. But when she was bad she was horrid!” Bear with me now, you don’t get so many quotes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Amazon reviews.

I bought two of these, intending to set up 6 or so separate watering zones in the garden–to give a more controllable irrigation instead of flooding some places whilst maybe leaving others parched. (Our water pressure here is relatively low, measured at 2 bar, and it seems a good idea to have a number of relatively short periods of faster water flow, directed to the right places, rather than one long slow one going everywhere with so much potential for wastage.) These distributors seem a very good way of cutting back on the overall amounts of pipework and hoses needed, and also economising on the number of timer/programmers needed.

The first one of the two gave satisfactory results straight away, with the mechanism clicking round reliably in time with the settings of the timer, feeding two separate sections of soaker hose and a rather distant pair of micro-sprinklers. But the second one proved to be much more picky, feeding one section of soaker hose and clicking round from that OK, but being a bit diffident about moving between another pair of pipes, each feeding a large selection of micro-sprinklers.
Suspecting the second unit might be faulty, I substituted it for the first one, and hey presto! The second unit works as well as the first one when installed in precisely the same circumstances. Clearly it must be something to do with the “back pressure” from the pipes the distributor feeds—the easier the water flow, the lower the back pressure, and the less the distributor can build up the energy to move its internal mechanisms. The manual barely gives the user any insight or practical guidance into this, despite the unit’s high cost.
Getting all of this right is going to involve frustration, reconfiguring pipework by trial and error, with no specific method other than to fiddle with pressure reducers, number of micro-sprinklers on any one run of pipework, etc. There’s no guarantee of success. So, when she’s bad she really is horrid, and it will take quite a while before I know that my system is reliable. And reliability is the one thing you really need from an automatic watering system.

This is very simple and very cool. I installed three impact sprinklers a couple of weeks ago but struggled with consistent water pressure (which was above average at 4 bar). I ended up running a separate hose to each sprinkler with the water distributor connected to the main outlet, controlled via the Gardena Smart Water controller.

The barrel only rotated when the feed to the next watering hose is effected when the pressure drops. The pressure drop is what makes the barrel cycle. So you need a way of changing pressure to utilise the 6 hoses.
We used used a tap link connected to the web that switched of and on at a pre-determined cycle and that worked well. We cpiuld change the time, duration and sequence and with each off – and then on, the barrel cycles to the next hose. I’m sure any timer could do this – but note it doesn’t cycle on its ow

Great service, item arrived in good time and packaged well.
It was set up and in use withing hours of delivery. Works great. We went on holiday concerned as to how our plants would fair. No need to have worried – we came home to beautiful plants that had faired wonderfully through a really hot period in the UK.

The product pictures and description (even on their website) is not sufficient till you actually buy one. It’s not clear whether this thing has a timer of its own or completely relies on the other product they sell. So let me explain:

1. It’s a simple device that directs water inlet to an outlet ranging from 1 to 6
2. It only switches to a different outlet when it detects a drop in pressure, e.g. when you turn the inlet off. If you buy this without their advertised timer, it’s completely and utterly useless, as you would manually have to turn the tap on and off for it to switch to a different outlet (it starts with 1 and moves upwards).
3. Other than the first two outlets, the rest can be ‘blocked’ or ‘switched off’. When it tries to redirect the water to one of the outlets that are switched off, it detects the high pressure build-up and so switches to another outlet till it finds one that’s ‘open’.
4. It has no timer / timing functionality of its own.
5. You cannot switch to a different outlet while the tap / inlet is ON. The red button you see only allows you to switch manually if the inlet is off. Again – useless if you don’t use their timer.

Any timer will work as long as it is able to support multiple timings throughout the day. The top end one they advertise is possibly the one we should be using, but I had another one I was able to tweak to make things work. Sadly though, since my existing timer only supports ‘three times a day, with intervals of 6 hours’ – that meant that the distributor won’t switch between outlets at least for 6 hours. This isn’t ideal if you would like to water your lawn using sprinklers one after another immediately at, say, 6pm. For that I suppose you would need to buy their more expensive programmable timer.

Purchased this after the dismal failure of the previous version. All I can say is it does what it says on the box. I use just two of the outputs via a Gardena Watering computer. With the new version you only need a programmer with two off and on modes as the valves switch easy with each off and on command between my two outputs. It’s also water tight which is another improvement over the previous model. 5 Stars!