There are plenty of battery-operated manifolds and control panels, although it's been long enough that I can't recommend any or tell you if the modern ones are good. I'm happy enough with mine but only have six zones and don't irrigate the lawn very much (really, at all any longer).

And I do run two to three heads with my flow, which is not much better than yours, and pressure of about 35 PSI (also an important thing to know). The entire front or back garden runs off a single zone.

One question would be whether your well would be at risk of running dry. An acre is a lot to water properly, an inch a week, requiring about 0.6 gallons of water per square foot. An acre is 43,500 square feet, so you'll need 26,100 gallons to water it properly.

That's a lot of water and potentially a problem on many home wells.

Hmm, I didn't think about the quantity of water... I have 6 sprinklers right now, just hooked to 2 separate spigots. I usually run 2 at once for about 20 minutes, then switch to 2 others, then to 2 others, so it takes about an hour to run all 6. But these don't cover 4 of my gardens or any of my front lawn.

You and I are in the same general zone (I'm in western NC, a little Southwest of you), so I'm not in a dry area or anything. I probably wouldn't need to run a full 26,000 gallons, we have enough rain that I would probably just need to run them during dry periods. Maybe if there's a control panel that measures the water in the soil, and only runs when it's necessary?

I could always set up 2 rain barrels, but those are only 50G +/- and that's a pretty small dent in 26,000 :-O

There are rain sensors, but I'm not familiar with a soil moisture sensor. However, it sounds like something that would exist. One really only has to add the water that nature doesn't, and only when nature doesn't. This year, that was really only during June and July; August, so far, has been a rain-fest in Pennsylvania.

Unfortunately, that June and July period would also be when the well is at its lowest. I'm sure you could probably have the well evaluated for volume or something like that to be sure, or simply see if it overdraws once, then back off it does.

Or just keep the area around the house fully irrigated and allow the areas further away to go a little less well-watered. Pardon the pun.

Twenty minutes per head does seem short for an inch of water (but about right to bring in new sod). Lay out some tuna cans (which are one inch deep) and see how long they take to fill, or how much they fill during that 20 minute irrigation. That one inch is optimal over a week, and best delivered either all at once, or, during very hot weather, half in one shot, half 3 to 4 days later.

The consequences, on established lawns, of watering too little but too often are short roots that never reach down deep for water, and a major risk of fungus as the crown and base of the grass is wet too often.

New sod will need to be continuously damp until it does grow roots, with the whole soil profile moist until it establishes new roots. Then back off as it grows in to let it develop those deep roots that will dig for water.

I gotcha. Right now my gardens are mostly shallow perennials (bulb flowers, coral bells and speedwell, sedum, etc), so I haven't needed the roots to grow deep. But when I lay sod then it sounds like I'll need to adjust.

My goal is to wipe out the existing grass this month, then lay sod in mid-September. It's not so hot then, and hopefully everything would be well enough established by Summer '21 that the sprinklers on the lawn wouldn't be so critical.

I still want to run sprinklers to all of the gardens, though. The 3 in the front yard require me to manually haul jugs of water every other day, and that's a time consuming process! The most intensive is a blue java banana tree that I planted this year, and the only good location just happened to be 300' away from the spigot in the front yard :-(