My zones are setup with everything such as noting which are flat, which are on slopes, all are sandy loam, all have rotor heads “Hunter PGP”, etc.
When creating a Flexible Daily schedule it sets all to have their first run be 1 hour and 22 minutes for each of those 9 zones. With that schedule I’d be running from dusk until dawn. I haven’t yet used the feature, since anytime the lawn has been watering anywhere near that much I’d get mushrooms and risk other diseases from so much water. Currently I’m working on doing catch cups since I assume the issue is it defaults to .4 precipitation rate based on the Hunter Rotors, which doesn’t factor in that every adjunct zone will also add some water to other zones. So hopefully that will help. But this discussion is about the following.
Also odd, that the daily flex doesn’t seem to factor in slope or sunlight since each zone recommends exact same duration even though some are in shade, some are in sun, some slope some flat. Assuming it only factors in those datasets if the soil type isn’t sandy loam?
I’ve read on the support docs that Flexible Daily keeps the same duration throughout the same season and only changes the frequency. But another help doc mentions that’s untrue and that the first watering will be longer duration than other future waterings. So not sure which statement is true. Is it that the initial watering tries to get 1 in of rain all in one day, and then going forward it will typically run a duration half of that (assuming its set to water each time it reaches 50%). Meaning in the future if say there was no rain and not overly hot or cold it would run say twice a week to get a full inch.
Assuming so, that makes sense. And if it did rain say half an inch one week then it would only irrigate once that week for example.
While that logic would make sense, I’m still confused on why the initial run time tries to do 1 inch of rain all at once and does not factor in how wet the ground currently is or will be that week based on weather. For instance it rained a good amount a few days ago, and its suppose to rain the next three days massively, some places may get up to 3 inches of rain. If I started the Daily Schedule today, it would water for about 12 hours and put down and inch of water, even though the ground already is relatively soaked from rain this week, and more importantly will be getting more inches of rain tonight through the next few days. So, confused on why the initial daily flex schedule doesn’t factor in that weather information?
If there is no way around that my guess is, I have to wait to start the Rachio Flex Daily for a time when it hasn’t rained that week and won’t be raining the rest of the week presumably to avoid over watering. And then going forward in future weeks Rachio would factor in weather accordingly. Is that correct?