My trial of Water as needed

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So, now that I can select all my Zones (thanks for fixing the WEB app) I have made my first two attempts at setting up water as needed scheduled. (Being VERY CAREFUL not to delete my Flex schedules which are working quite nicely, thank you very much.) Here are my issues and observations. All are based on the WEB appā€“it is much more convenient to use than the small screen.

  1. Setting start times is a bit convoluted. First you click on the ā€œ>ā€ on the start time, then you must guess that you click on the time box. When you do figure that out you get the time selector drop-down. It would be much nicer to go directly to the time drop-down from the ā€œ>ā€. No need for an annoying and confusing extra step.

  2. The default watering times (and maybe intervals seem bizarre. I have two Flex schedules, a rose garden and a general garden. The difference between the two is just the allowed depletion and efficiency settings. (Rose-AD 40%, E 60%, general AD 30%, E 80%) I do not really remember, but probably these were set to get the watering times as I wanted.

When I setup the Water as needed schedules the rose garden time defaulted to 10 min which was pretty close to the 11 min of the Flex schedule. The general garden defaulted to 5 minutes. Its Flex schedule was 8 minutes. I upped the interval to 7 min.

But more interesting was that first I setup a single schedule for the two zones. For that the TOTAL time was 9 minutes.

  1. Watering intervals are a total mystery. The rose garden seems to be on an every other day schedule. The general garden seems to be daily. Why the shorter watering interval and more frequent watering? Inquiring minds want to know.

Things may change tomorrow, The schedules have not been in place over night yet. But at the moment the Water As Needed schedules are leaving me cold. They have unexpected behavior and (so far) no feedback as to what will happenā€“e.g. the moisture graphs do not have run predictions like found on Flex schedules.

Flex was scheduled to run tomorrow and so are both these zones Water As Needed schedules. So for now I will leave them enabled and the Flex disabled. But unless a light bulb comes on I am unlikely to use the new schedules.

Forum presentation note: The second #1 really should be #3, but apparently the forum editor knows better than I how to present this list. Guess you cannot have multiple paragraph bullet points.

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Thanks @sbillard for taking your time to offer opinions and feedback, it means a lot to us.

WAN schedules update intervals monthly; not daily. The zones are grouped by schedule and do not run independently of each other. Feedback on skips will occur roughly 1 hour before the scheduled start time of the schedule.

Good; we do not recommend running WAN & Flex schedules at the same time (will add that to the best practices :wink: )

Please remember to add feedback to WAN schedules to the thread below going forward; itā€™s best for everyone to reflect and learn from each otherā€™s feedback.