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Central IL | http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=228824&mid=173... As stated in this post, the book seems to give no help. The local salesmen and technicians are clueless on this subject I assume because of Deeres lack of info. I read the same thing in the book "Do not exceed 125 psi". So I started planting and checking out the other 500 things on the planter to get started with the new planter. My salesman was there for a half hour or so to get me started. After I called him on the down pressure issue he told me to "look in the book". Meanwhile I did go back and check if I could spin the guage wheels. I could easily. I think I planted the first couple of fields with not enough down pressure. Does anyone have this figured out? If the screen says 100, does that mean a hundred pounds of downpressure? What am I missing? |
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| I believe it is 100 lbs downpressure, not psi. Someone will correct me if I am wrong.
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East Central Kansas |
We were running ours last week at 250, and the max air pressure of the unit is 125psi.
John K |
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Dalhart Texas | I actually ran ours yesterday. I have no clue what the screen is reading but we set it at 175 and had 60 actual on the row units. Had all sorts of problems getting seed deep enough until we cranked it up. I assume Deere's book should say don't go over 300lbs on the screen. Cause I'm guessing at about that setting it would hitn125 lbs on the rows. Hate to say it, we had a factory Deere guy here a few days ago and he had no clue on the planter deal. Our local guys knew as much or more than he did. |
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Central IL | Am I missing or not seeing a guage or something? "I have no clue what the screen is reading but we set it at 175 and had 60 actual on the row units." What did you set at 175? The only indicator I have is the setting on the screen. How did you know you had 60 on the row units?
Edited by Les Grossman 4/24/2011 20:49
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| Had ours set at 190, actual pounds read between 188 to 194. Checked depth wheels by hand, just right(in our soils, No-Til). |
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Ottawa, Ontario | This is where the 20/20 monitor can come in handy. With load cells installed, it measures how much weight you have on the guage wheels and if you need to add more down pressure to keep the units in the ground. It will also tell you if you have excessive weight to do the job. If you have pneumatic downpressure, the monitor can control it and change your dp on the fly. Takes the guessing out of it. |
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NE Illinois | The actual down force on the row unit is about x3.3 of the psi. The book recommends not exceeding 125psi or 410lbs of actual down force on the row unit, but this is just a recommendation. I would say a good starting point is 65psi or 215 lbs, but this obviously varies greatly depending on soil type, tillage practices, etc. The reading on the screen shows lbs of down force at the row unit, the gauge on the compressor shows psi of the airbags.
Edited by JohnDeereAMS 4/25/2011 23:39
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Central IL | Thanks!!!! That is exactly what I was looking for, somehow I missed this in the book. I will have to look again to see if there is a guage on my compressor, I don't remember seeing one. |
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| I'm quite confident they're talking about JD's version of the 20/20. The XP system now has down pressure monitoring sensors just like the 20/20. It appears that the software to interpret the down pressure is confusing though. If I were to take a guess, next year there will be some software revisions that will help things make more sense. Until that time, and even after, I fully intend to rely on the method of checking the gauge wheels even though we have the XP monitoring system as well. |
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| Mine does not have an air pressure guage on the planter but there is a valve stem that you can put a tire guage on back there. The valve stem will give you the reading of what is actually in the air bags, not what is in the storage tanks. And as stated above, it will be the air pressure rating which is about 1/3 of physical downforce on the row.
FYI if you bleed down the storage system for any reason, it takes forever for the onboard compressor to fill it back up and I would think the compressor would build a lot of heat. On the back of the planter where the air system is at, there is a fill and exhaust solenoid for the air bags. Each one has a manual bypass which is a small metal button. You can hold the bypass on the fill solenoid and fill the whole system through the valve stem. This will put 120 or whatever psi of air or 375lbs of actual downforce in the air bags but then you can bleed it off of them and the storage tank will still be full.
Edit: My setup may be different than others. It is a drawbar planter and it is setup to be switched easily between 2 tractors. The compressor is mounted under the tongue behind the tractor. A 2pt planter probably has the compressor in a different spot and may have a guage on it.
Edited by MidMOfarmer 4/24/2011 23:02
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| To add a little more, Im pretty sure that the system wont let you go over 125psi or 375lbs of downforce. Once you get to that, the exhaust valve will automatically open and bleed off back down to 125. Heres another post on it and you can read my reply but from the way Ive understood it, you set it to 90lbs of downforce but the sensors also have to have a target rate set and it will most likely be different than 90. Im just going off of my own tests but it seems like you get the downforce set where you want it and then if the alarms are going off saying the downpressure is too high or low, go into the sensor setup page and change the sensor target until the alarms quit. Changing the sensor target will still leave your actual setting at 90lbs or whatever you choose.
http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=227366&posts=6... |
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West Kentucky | I know everybody is high on the 20/20 down force system, but I don't really see how it can work either. Essentially you are setting that system to work in a particular set of conditions. If you vary those conditions, the settings may or may not be correct. So basically, at the end of the day, you are back to physically grabbing the wheel and trying to spin it. Our fields typically have 4-5 different soil types so that equals a lot of different conditions. Now, if some one could create a variable rate down force system that was reliable and accurate, then I can see how it could work. |
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Gibson City, IL | That system does exist, its called 20/20 Airforce. I don't understand why you don't believe that a 20/20 would work in more than one soil condition. It is reading weight on the guage wheels. No matter what kind of soil conditions that you are running in, it is reading weight on the guage wheels. You typically want there to be about 40-60 lbs of excess weight on the gauge wheels. That way if you hit a hard spot the planter is not coming out of the ground immediately. |
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| The weigh pins on both the John Deere system and the 20/20 system are supposed to be able to make it so that you can measure how much pressure is on a guage wheel while the planter is moving, without having to get out and make an estimate by hand. If it works, it is very handy. Like all measurement devices though, it is just a tool and not a substitute for common sense. The sensors can and do fail with both the John Deere and the 20/20 system. What happens is the gauge wheel is pushed up because the ground is contacting the bottom side of the gauge wheel. The wheel hits the depth stop. If you are in very hard conditions, the gauge wheel may never hit that depth stop and therefore your weigh pin will indicate 0 pounds. If you are in soft ground conditions and have way too much down force dialed in, the depth stop will have a lot of pressure on it and therefore the weigh pin will indicate a high amount of down pressure. In an ideal world you would always have just enough down pressure to get gauge wheel up to the depth stop, but not enough down pressure to put any excess force on the depth stop. This is obviously not possible. The down pressure monitoring systems measure several row units (usually either 3 or 5 row units depending on the size of your planter) simultaneously. They keep track of the amount of down pressure by reading the weight on the weigh pins. You can look at the individual row units or you can look at an averege if you want. The long and the short of it is that if you don't have malfunctions, this system works and works well. If you have the capability of varying the air pressure with the controls in the cab, not only can you monitor it on the go, but you can adjust it on the go in response to varying conditions. The 20/20 air force system will take it another step further and adjust it for you automatically and you don't even have to think about it. The problem occurs when a sensor either needs to be recalibrated or outright fails (and this is not uncommon in my experience with the 20/20 last year). You then make critical planting decisions based on incorrect data. In my opinion there is no substitute for observing ground conditions and making sure that you're air pressure reflects something that is close to what you would expect, in addition to getting out once in awhile and manually checking that the down pressure is where you want it to be. If the system is automatically adjusting things for you, or you're adjusting fromt he cab based on the info the sensors are telling you, my opinion is that you need to get out and manually check more often than you did back when you set it and then forgot about it. The reason is that if a sensor goes out of calibration it may reduce downpressure recommendations excessively and you won't know it unless you get out and check. Moral? Use common sense. |
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| There is a chart in the book that indicates 120# of air pressure equals somewhere around 425# to 450# of down pressure. You had me worried when you said that 375 is the max because on the older planters you could always get 400# of down pressure without setting a pressure relief valve off and for our ground conditions, haveing any less than that can result in very poor performance at times. |
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| MidMOfarmer - 4/24/2011 22:58 This will put 120 or whatever psi of air or 375lbs of actual downforce in the air bags but then you can bleed it off of them and the storage tank will still be full. Where is the 375 number coming from? The book I'm looking at says 120 PSI = about 425 PSI according to the chart they have. I'm not looking in my actual planter manual right now as it's in the tractor. I'm looking at the manual for 1770NT CCS Planter w/Pro-Series XP Row Units (735101-) on the Deere site which I believe should be the same as the one in the tractor.
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Dalhart Texas | The actual psi on the screen is usualy 5lbs below target. But there is a valve stem on back of our planter on the discharge side of air tanks that is on the air bag feed line. That is where we are reading 15lb with a tire gauge.
sorry i wasnt clear on that. |
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| I was going off of memory from 2 weeks ago. I just checked on my monitor and the seedstar XP would allow a max of 400lbs, I don't know how many PSI of air that is. |
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West Kentucky | Your post is pretty much why I don't think it will work because that is how I understood it too. If it is just adjusting weight on the gauge wheels and you have to run nearly 60 lbs extra lbs of pressure, you are going to create a terrible mess. 60 lbs is nearly 33% of the total down pressure I have been running in notill conditions this year. Our pressure has ranged from 150 lbs to 215 lbs this year depending on soil types and tillage or lack there of. It can not be good to have to run that much extra pressure and create that much extra sidewall compaction which our soils are prone to get if you are not cautious. However, after dpilot's explanation, it sounds a little more feasable. Still think conditions change too rapidly for it to totally keep up, but it may. |
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Driftless SW Wisconsin | As JD AMS points out above, 60 psi is a good starting point for air pressure. It should be VERY rare if ever that you operate over 100 psi of air pressure. Remember excess air pressure and down force tends to break stuff and causes unnecessary wear on the planter row units. It can also cause drive wheel slip and population issues by lifting/unloading the toolbar. Regardless of how much electronics you have in the cab, pleas stop with the row units down in a typical spot on your first field and - dig some seed to check seed depth and spacing - try to lift a number of gage wheels, you should not be able to lift them off of the ground, they should be on the depth stops as mentioned by a poster above. - if you can't lift any gage wheels that means you are on the stops, at least in that spot and not moving, then try to skid/rotate a number of gage wheels across the width of the planter. You should be able to rotate the gage wheels with some effort by hand. They should not feel like they are welded to the ground (which they will be at 125 psi!) but you should also not be able to rotate therm very easily also. At planting speed they will tend to lighten up a bit from stationary. Planting is the most important operation in the row crop year. Please stop and take the timeto double check whatever electronics you use. (But wait until you see our Rfx!) Good luck this spring. Jim at Dawn
Edited by Jim 4/25/2011 10:15
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Chebanse, IL..... | dpilot
Do you recall just "where" in the book (JD?) you saw that chart. We have looked but didn't see anything like it. Could've overlooked it though.
Thanks |
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| I still haven't checked our actual planter manual. I found that information here, in an online version of the manual on the JD website. If you scroll down to section 45 of the manual on the left side and then click on pneumatic down force, there will be a graph with air pressure on the x-axis and down force on the y-axis. Like I said, I haven't checked to see if the same graph is in our book, but I think I selected the correct online manual so I would assume it is. |
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Chebanse, IL..... | dpilot
Thanks for the link to on-line vers. I'm pretty sure that graph isn't in the newest (2011) printed book, but I understand that the on-line versions of things are normally more up-to-date than printed versions, which would be understandable. |
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| You are right. I checked our book today and it's not in there. |
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Does anyone understand the XP downpressure deal?
