Flexible Daily - HOA split day restrictions

I bought the Rachio this week with the goal of maximizing savings. I previously did some research and thought I could incorporate my Home Owners Association (HOA) watering restrictions*. When I went to set-up my flexible daily schedule, I only found the feature that allows you to select multiple days at a time and choose an “after time” that applies to all days. I called and was told that the current version of the software doesn’t support this type of restriction and that I should use Fixed days.

I’m disappointed as I’m assuming I won’t be able to maximize my savings with the “fixed days” scheduling method. Is there another way to maximize savings given these HOA restrictions?

HOA Watering restrictions:
MON: 1600 hrs to 2400 hrs 4:00pm to 12:00 midnight
TUE: 0000 hrs to 1000 (12:01am to 10:00am)
TH: 1600 hrs to 2400 hrs 4:00pm to 12:00 midnight
FRI: 0000 hrs to 1000 (12:01am to 10:00am)

Those are some tough restrictions… basically it’s 2 days where the evening before and morning after are really just 1 day. I’m curious about your climiate. Where do you live?

Strangest restrictions I have ever seen. I can understand no daytime watering, but don’t why the ban on overnight watering. Where are you located? Can’t you get a variance because you have a Rachio? These HOAs often become like mini kingdoms. If there is no water utility restriction what can they do to you? Why are these restrictions in place?

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I don’t know of any controller that could follow this screwy schedule.

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I think a “less-smart” controller could be configured to work with these restrictions, but the Rachio can’t be tweaked the same way. As @Modawg2k noted, your allowed watering can be interpreted as two days a week with a midnight to 6pm allowed time if your controller was set up for a time zone 16hrs ahead of your actual time zone. On a dumb controller, you’d manually set the date/time to make this happen. Since the Rachio uses latitude/longitude to automatically set your date/time AND figure out your closest weather station, you can’t use the dumb controller time zone hack.

Since it is generally not recommended to water in the evening (promotes fungal growth and such overnight), I think you are best off just configuring your system to water on Tue/Fri with a start time of midnight or 1am (or later if you know your runtimes won’t run into the 10am cutoff). I have flex daily set up with Wed/Sat allowed starting at 3am for spray zones, and those zones are done watering by 8am.

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