I’ve trying to determine whether I want to use flex daily or flex monthly schedules and have noticed a discrepancy with runtimes that I’m not understanding. I created two sets of schedules for the same zones (cool season grass), one for flex daily and one for flex monthly. The flex monthly schedule has all of my zones (almost identical zone configurations) running daily for 25 minutes per zone (on like zones). The flex daily schedule has the same zones running every other day for 55 minutes per zone.
As a beginner, which schedule is preferable?
I’m biased, but I will only use Flex Daily. While it is considered more complex, I feel it does a much better job. Most of the difference you are seeing in the times, given that everything is set up the same, is probably much hotter weather at this time than normal for your location. I also think that Flex monthly, to be safer, in general applies less water at a time (it doesn’t know the soil moisture conditions), and tends to water more often. Flex Daily will water more at one time, then wait for the moisture to dry out about 50% before watering.
For me, there are two dealbreakers: Flex Monthly ALWAYS waters all the zones in a schedule on the same day (prolonging watering times), while Flex daily spreads them out better. And Flex Daily responds to ACTUAL weather conditions, while Flex Monthly responds to average, historic weather.
Also, I can calculate by hand exactly what Flex Daily wants to do, and confirm on the moisture charts that it’s doing it. With Flex Monthly, there is no moisture charts to look at, and I haven’t been able to calculate anything for it to compare.
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