Have any of you had situations where moisture level for a zone is ~5 % but it is projected to rain in 2 days. Flex does not account for this and waters even if it is 24 hrs before it is gonna rain. What I have been doing is put it on standby so it does not water so that rain can take care of it. Am I doing this wrong ? Is there a way I can make this automatic maybe using IFTTT ?
Thanks
Love the forum
S
Could it be that the projected rain isn’t enough to get you the 45% that takes you to full ? Take a look at your moisture graphs to see if you see something like this. We have no rain in site, but it still goes two days in a row, seemingly because one full watering doesn’t take it from 50% to full. I’m pretty sure the system alters frequency rather than duration for short term adjustments. I believe that the duration gets adjusted somewhat due to seasonal changes.
@Linn So there’s never a duration change with Flex ? I received alerts with minor duration changes at some point, but that might have been when I was on As Needed. I changed over a couple of weeks ago so I’m probably confusing the two.
Never, seasonal adjustments are not effective. If you are already watering to filed capacity, adding more water results in runoff.
Personally I don’t think it matters.
That percip will fall in 2 days and increase your moisture balance that will prolong the next interval anyway.
I guess you waste water if the rain pushes a over your field capacity.
But I don’t like my yard to get heat stressed because I use growth regulator and recovery takes much longer.
And also I’m using a mad of 70 so I don’t have much wiggle room.
The watering duration does not change in flex, just the frequency. Watering will be skipped if the IRO predicts the moisture balance will stay above 0% (the allowed depletion), before the next available watering date . In the graph above from azdavidr, the system waters 0.42 in, the difference between field capacity and the allowed depletion level. On May 9, it watered 0.42 in, but there was 0.23 in of moisture loss, so it had to water again on May 10 to avoid hitting 0% moisture level again. After 2 waterings, the ET was less the next two days so no watering was needed. The zone would water again on May 13 unless the predicted precip was greater than the predicted ET, as the moisture level was almost 0 after May 12.
