FL User, 2 Watering Days, is a Flex Schedule Possible?

Hello fantastic people of the lawn, I’m hoping you will have some insight into what would work for my situation.

I just installed my Rachio 3 a week ago and am still learning and trying to dial in the settings, so please forgive any and all ignorance.

I live in Central Florida and am restricted to watering only on Sundays and Thursdays between 4p-10a. I tried to dial in my advanced zone settings and started off with a Flex Daily schedule. However, after two runs (one this past Sunday and one today) I feel like I am either missing something or a Flex Daily schedule just won’t work for the restrictions my area constantly has.

The Flex Daily schedule ran, but the run times seem very short, at 15 minutes or less for around a 7k sq ft zone, and only getting 2 of 3 Zones to 50% soil moisture. For 3 zones it only ran for a total of 54 minutes. Within 30 minutes after watering those zones they had already gone down into the 40s for soil moisture and were predicted to be back to 0% by tomorrow. With that prediction shouldn’t it have watered longer to “fill up” the zone?

I looked at creating a Flex Monthly schedule, but that came out to even shorter planned run times. 11 minutes per zone in Florida when our temps are already in the 80s seems incorrect, no? Additionally the Flex Monthly was also scheduling to only water on Thursdays, which also feels wrong for Florida. From what I’ve read, flex monthly is a little more static so I wouldn’t expect this to update to also water on Sundays, right?

The forcasted high tomorrow is 87F, I would think the lawn would need more water than Flex Daily gave it today. It’s only going to get hotter and I just don’t feel comfortable with what either of the flex schedules are planning to do. Am I misunderstanding something?

Thank you all in advance!

Flex Daily isn’t really recommended for people with strict watering restrictions.

While there might be other issues involved with your setup (precipitation rate, soil type, etc) I think you might be better off with a fixed schedule.

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