Did anything change since last year?

I can’t seem to track down the source of the changes, but my system seems to be watering a lot more than last year. No time at the moment to lay out all of my settings, but is there anything stupid or obvious that maybe I missed? I have areas of my lawn where I have mushrooms that I never had (a clear sign of too much water) yet I also have large areas that clearly aren’t getting enough (it’s been VERY hot here lately) - maybe it’s watering more because of the heatwave, and the ‘dry’ areas are simply not getting enough…

There shouldn’t be any major changes. Uniformity of lawn sprinklers may be at play here — have you done an annual audit of your sprinklers to make sure they are operating in top form with good overlap? I have to do this every 6 months or so since my heads like to go out of adjustment.

As for hotter days, since one Flex schedule by design only waters a zone once in a day (as needed), there may be times when you’ll need to water in the afternoon. On particularly hot days, the entire lawn root zone could lose all of its water through evapotranspiration. A supplemental water on such afternoons may be a good idea (say, for the usual duration of a Flex run so you know you’ve “filled” the root zone). I have a Fixed schedule that I turn on when there are consecutive days of 100 degree + temperatures to replenish moisture into the root zone. Otherwise for one-off days, I manually water from the comfort of my couch.

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So, life got busy and I forgot I posted this, so thanks for the reply. I now have THOUSANDS of mushrooms… the other thing I’m noticing is that for the month of July, my system shows “0 time saved” due to weather intelligence… and the ACTUAL and SCHEDULED times for each zone are identical. However, I can confirm that I get messages every few days indicating “RAIN SKIP” so I know it’s adhering to the weather, but it’s severely over-watering. We have had a lot of rain lately, so I’d attribute the mushrooms to that alone… except that the neighbors seem to have NO mushrooms at all. It’s definitely my system doing it… just not sure why.

Sounds you like have a pretty mild climate. I’m jealous. Without your zone settings, etc., my first inclination is to adjust the crop coefficient/evapotranspiration down 10% or 20% and check the Soil Moisture Chart to see how that affects frequency of watering. With mushrooms you’ll need a bit more time between watering so the top of the soil dries enough by evapotranspiration.

As for the dry spots — that’s intrinsic to the sprinkler head adjustments, position, water pressure, etc and so a physical fix would be needed. Otherwise you’ll need to overwater part of your lawn to make the dry areas go away.

@MirskyFamily Can you post screenshots of your schedule settings and zone settings (if they are flex schedules)?

:cheers:

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First thing I noticed was you are probably watering way too often (frequency) but not deep watering.

The Z5 zone has a .07 available water capacity (loamy sand) and only waters .21 inches at a time. My guess is you could be watering every day or every other day. I’d start by changing to loam soil type and looking at the moisture graph to see if it spreads the watering out more. If the zone duration changes too much (increased) you can always move that down a bit.

:cheers: