I am loving the product so far, but what I am finding is that the majority of articles found that discuss Advacned settings and what is used by Flex schedules seem to be really old, pre-18. Are there any articles that discuss what is support in 2020? I am really starting to dig into the Advanced settings and wanting to setup the Flex Daily. But, when I research it is all old information and before Flex schedules utilized most of the Advanced settings. Is this left in the same state or were improvements made?
Also, where is everyone finding their crop co-efficients? I see average seems to be best used, but how is that average or how is it determined?
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The articles should be up-to-date, those schedules really haven’t changed in that time span.
I would use the defaults for each crop type unless you feel the system is over or under watering.
What I am finding is that Flex Monthly seems to run each zone 19-28 minutes based on shade and slope. But when I move to Flex Daily those times increase to a flat 38mins per zone. It doesn’t seem to factor in something, or maybe Flex Monthly is taking something into consideration that it shouldn’t.
Flex daily takes into account more than monthly will. Daily will water in a way that will promote the healthiest most drought tolerant plants. For this reason, it waters for longer durations, but less frequently.
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Thanks @tmcgahey. I slept on this exact same thought. I was wondering if it was watering longer to “fill the bucket”. Then allowing it to reach the 50% mark before running again. I first setup the flex daily just to see the run times and I noticed that it was only running upto 85% fill, so I really only had a 35% to play with. Any reason this is done intead of filling to 90% or greater and actually having a 50% delay before the next run time.
I’ll probably take @franz tride and true suggestion of only setting up one or two zones to see what exact happens, then go from there.
Because Flex Daily runs a fixed duration. If you don’t make any settings changes, the duration of run won’t change, only frequency of run. It may take 2 days for it to get down enough to kickstart a run, and then it may be at 100%+, and then may take 3-4 days for it to kickstart a run…
The main thing with Flex Daily is making sure that you have ALL the zone parameters dialed in as much as possible. Other issues people see, is with their prior manual watering, they watered frequently, for short duration. Just the opposite of Flex Daily. This causes short root depth since the roots don’t have to go deep for water. If this is you, it might take some time, playing with the root depth setting, to re-train your roots to dig deeper and build up to those long, infrequent waterings.
@tmcgahey, Thanks! My plan is to leave it on Monthly for now. I will pick up catch cups this weekend to dial in the sprinkler settings. From what Franz was saying it seems crop co-effiecents do not change. I’m assuming the default AW is based on the soil type selected? So I could leave that setting alone too. I would just need to take into account area and Nozles Inch per hour. Efficieny could be determined when I do catch cups I believe. Is there a handy calculator that oyu could intput all your meassurements to get efficiency? Or, what is the formula? I’ll do some community searches here in a bit to see if this has been discussed already.