Negative Impact of Manually Watering on a Flex Scheduled Zone

[emil]

@briansusername

My backyard is not large and has three zones. The borders of the zones overlap (head-to-head spacing) so the three zones are linked. I figure when they run at the same time, those overlap sections get a deeper watering, right? If they ran on separate days, the water doesn’t soak in as deep. So it makes sense to put them on the same schedule so they water together, right? (I’m asking a lot ’ cause I don’t know much about irrigation and could easily be wrong!)

@briansusername, you might benefit from doing a catch cup test to measure how much water is being applied to your zones. Here’s a great white paper written on the best practices of how to conduct a catch cup test by the Center for Irrigation Technology.

@briansusername

My neighbor’s cat likes to wander into my yard occasionally and I like to scare him out of the yard by manually running one zone for one minute (or less).

Just curious, is this occurring multiple times a day? I wouldn’t think that a quick manual run once a week will throw off your Flex schedule much, but happy to review your account for you if you’d like. Just email our support team [support@rachio.com] and reference this post.

@briansusername

it seems like those short little waterings shouldn’t matter much, if they are just one minute per day…is it important to keep all of my back yard on the same schedule? Or do the overlaps not really matter much? Would this be a good case for not counting manual waterings in some circumstances?

I have a few ideas on ways to fix this for short durations, but it will take some testing before we can make any major system changes. Pending the test results, I’ll post an update here in a few weeks.