Extended Delay Watering

I live in Northern California and often in the Winter we have weekly rain.

Combined with Cool weather (50’s in the day), shorter days (little sun), and often rain at least weekly I find myself delaying watering manually. But with only 7 days of delay possible today it isn’t enough… Having a longer delay would certainly be easier… Perhaps up to 30 days. This would be a small change and would really help to ensure I don’t water when it is not needed.

Another solution would be to allow me to fill up all of the zones at once… I have two controllers with a total 24 zones. So doing this for each zone is annoying. Another reason why I use the manual delay.

Thoughts?

Wouldn’t be easier to just put the controller in stand-by mode?

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I’d put the station into standby. Set a reminder around mid April to exit standby though you’ll want to monitor your plant activity and soil moisture in case our winter has prolonged dry stretches. If you use flex daily you can still monitor zone soil moisture while in standby. However keep in mind winter water use by most plants is substantially reduced in the winter.

Standby would be a solution as a work around would be OK for some. I would rather the system be more automatic.

In January or February in my area I can count on rain… But not always and I don’t want to have to remember to turn the system back on.

So more delay days would be helpful to me… Or ability to fill up all of the zones with one command.

If you want that, you’ll need to at the very least manually decrease the crop evapotranspiration values to their winter values in advanced zone settings. Maybe 20-50% less than current values and set reminders to put them back to average or summer values. I’ve set my cold season lawn to 50% and it hasn’t watered in a few months. My stone fruits are also at 50% whereas peak summer I’ll have them usually set to 90%. Seems reasonable.

FYI I live in the North Sacramento valley.