Flex Daily schedule in SF Bay Area

[secret156]

Hi everyone!

I just set up a Rachio 3 to replace my old dumb controller. I have some nozzle stations for my lawn and drip stations for my shrubs / trees. I live in the SF Bay Area (specifically, Menlo Park, for those who know the area), and I previously had my controller set to 4 minutes per station per day for all stations, both sprinkler and drip. That kept my lawn looking reasonably OK, though there were some yellow patches, mostly from the times when one of the sprinkler heads wasn’t working.

I set the Rachio to do a Flex Daily schedule, and I was very surprised to see that it offered me a schedule with 23 minutes for each sprinkler station and 2 hours 46 minutes (!!!) for each drip station. It also set no irrigation for the next week and was then planning to irrigate for three days in a row with the above schedule. This amount of irrigation time seems absolutely insane to me. Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks!

[gangeli]

Hey, this happened to me too! I’d also be curious what’s going on here. I figured it was expecting drip systems to be 0.5-2 gallons per hour, and so 2.5 hrs is only ~3 gallons of water per plant. But it still seemed excessive (and really bad if flow is larger than just a drip).

[tmcgahey]

My drip zones run for over 3 hours each. Depending on the flow rate of your drip emitters, you may only be putting down 1-2gph. Here is a pretty good idea of recomended watering for plant size. This is a generalization and some plants can require more or less…even a very small 2’ diameter shrub needs 4 gallons of water, which if you have 1 gph emitters, that is 4 hours of watering…