I’ve used flex schedules for years, even during watering restrictions. It worked because Austin allowed drip systems (I am all drip, no sprinklers) to run any day even during droughts. However, the rules have changed and now even with drip I can only water Thursday and Sunday. I went into the Rachio app, turned off the flex schedules and created two fixed schedules with time restrictions to match the city requirement. They are limited to the two allowed days, and water after midnight up until 5am and after 7pm until midnight. This works fine and keeps me in compliance. However, as far as I can tell the Rachio does not seem to be varying durations as it did with Flex. The duration times are all the same as far out as the calendar goes. Does this mean a fixed schedule NEVER changes durations due to soil water, humidity, temperature, wind etc.? I hope I am wrong on this, because the current settings seem like they will use a lot more water than I was on flex scheduling. Maybe the system is trying to catch up since it’s been in hibernation for several months during the winter and we have had almost no rain.
Fixed schedules will skip for weather intelligence (rain, wind, temperature) and will adjust once per month if you have enabled seasonal shift (this is defaulted on).
This has a bit more information on seasonal shift.
Hope this helps! Just let us know if you have any other quesitions.
Thank you for the information Franz.
I have another question. When I first learned of the regulatory changes I looked at my flex schedules and was able to add an interval on one of them. It is set to water only on the assigned days and within the prescribed times. When I select that schedule it indicates a Flex Daily Schedule as the type and the interval is Thursday and Sunday. My other schedules do not show me an interval selector. How can I add an interval to my other Flex schedules? I’m not exactly sure how I added it to the first one.
UPDATE: I figured it out. I had to remove some old schedules and created a new single flex schedule to cover my watering. The new schedule numbers look good and it allows the interval setting to fit my areas water restrictions.
Yet another question. Watering is allowed on certain days and during specific time bands on those days. I can begin watering at midnight, but it has to stop by 5am. Then I can resume watering that same day at 7pm until midnight. I could not figure out a way to put this sort of time constraint into my Flex schedule. I’m not sure it’s 100% necessary as I think my beds will get enough water with the schedule running from midnight to 5am. That is, until we start getting 100º days one after another, which absolutely will happen. At that point it I might need water to be applied both morning and evening.
For this scenario I would make multiple flex schedules with one or more zones that would fit into each of those time constraints. Flex schedules can not have the same zone multiple times, so you will need to determine which zones will fit into those time constraints and move them around accordingly.