Advance Watering Calculations

First, start with one zone on Flex Daily, learn about the schedule, get it to where you like it, then move on to the next zone. It is easy to get overwhelmed and have poor results by doing it all at once and potentially using bad inputs. Bad inputs equals bad results. The trouble with drip systems is that sometimes they have been designed in a way that one kind of plant is going to have to suffer for the health of a priority plant. Emitter placement can often seem rather random, making it really hard to find a good Flex solution. I’ve designed my drip so that I set Flex Daily to water based on the largest tree and scale the drip emitters down for smaller trees. I add emitters as those trees grow. I use the largest tree’s drip line as the radius for my drip coverage area. One can also do this in reverse, water based on the smallest plant and scale the emitters from there based on individual plants.

Looks like your setup might be straightforward!

That said, check out this post and its linked spreadsheet to help figure how to set up your drip system zone settings (calculate precipitation rates in inches/hour etc). I think your current in/hr will see major adjustments if you carefully follow the post and spread sheet’s instructions.

Here’s another useful post on Flex Daily:

BTW as far as I know, square footage on Rachio zones are only used to estimate water usage without a flow meter.

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