Flex daily zone confused and keeps watering

My system has been working well for years but occasionally it goes haywire and this is one of those cases. I’ve not made any changes recently but almost every night lately it’s been watering even though the moisture graph shows it’s not needed. Normally I reboot the Iro and things go back to normal but it’s frustrating when this occurs as the system should be able to detect/fix this on it’s own and not wait for me to notice the steady stream of water going down the drain. Here’s one of the zones doing this:

Just noticed there seems to be a scheduling issue. I have it set to finish before 4am yet it’s starting around 11pm and finishing at 1am. I could have sworn it used to work backwards. For example to run every zone maybe a 11pm start is needed to finish by 4am but last night with only 1 of the 5 zones needing to run it started at 11pm. So this may be confusing me or the system when a watering event spans 2 days. Thus I’ve set it to run at 12:30am so we’ll see if that helps.

Another issue which may be related is the Iro knowingly overwaters during hot weather. For example if my max moisture balance is .5 and ET per day is .3 then it’ll do a full run each day instead of a shortened run that stops at 100%. I find this a bit annoying and if fixed could potentially be a fix for my issue where it waters to above 100%.

Flex daily doesn’t adjust the duration of a scheduled run, only frequency.

The “end by” is working as it should, albeit, not as most people expect. Right now, if it needs to end at 4am, it will start the schedule as if all the zones are going to run, even if only one zone needs to run.

Thanks about the “end by” tip, I wasn’t aware of that. I do understand that Flex daily never changes the duration, I just think there should be an override to shorten it if running will exceed 100-105% moisture balance. During the heat waves when this was an issue I got into the habit of manually running for half the normal duration which resolved the overwatering but I feel like the system should be able to do this itself. It’s only needed a few times a year so not too big of a deal.

I’m no longer sure my Iro was misbehaving, perhaps the ET estimate was a bit off (lots of wildfire smoke this past week) or I need to tweak the crop coefficient down to compensate this time of year. My yard is quite flat so even a slight overwatering causes water to drain to the street, very slowly for 12-24hrs. So I’m going to consider this user confusion and mark the issue as solved.

I’ve never seen my system do what yours did. And I’ve never seen it water and bring it up over 100%. But I do a set start time around 4am. I’m wondering if it had something to do with it starting the prior day due to the “end by” problem. Will be very curious to see if it’s fixed now.

Another thought here – if you have it set up as flat, it may not be doing a soak cycle, or maybe not a long enough one. Try setting it to steep and see what happens. The slope setting only affects the soak cycles.

I agree with Linn; I’ve never seen a chart like this, nor should it ever occur, unless watering was done manually.

As your graph shows, no watering was/is scheduled for 8/21 or 8/22. Which is correct. Now that those dates are here and passed, did the system water yesterday or today? If so, it appears something else is causing the watering to occur, rather than the schedule. Although the program knows about it, because it has recorded it in the past.

AHHHHHH - Do you perhaps have another schedule, probably a Fixed schedule, set to run at some frequency on this same zone? Applying less than the normal amount of Flex Daily water, but still significant? I’m doing that on one zone to give extra water during the day to some new sod. Anyhow, if you made up such a schedule, make sure it’s disabled and not adding water unnecessarily to the zone.

Since the original post I’ve reboot the Iro and changed the start time to 12:30am. I’ve done no manual watering for weeks nor made any other changes. The zone in question is not in any other currently active schedules. The good news is that it has not watered since and the graph is back to what I’d expect so I suspect the reboot resolved it. Though it could have been a quirk with the scheduling time as I had only switched to using 4am instead of sunrise a few months ago.

I have the zone set to slight slope, it didn’t do a cycle/soak but I don’t see that as a problem. The water only drains to the street an hour or more after watering, so it’s not direct/surface leakage. The water instead soaks through the lawn, hits the clay soil before soaking into the drainage system which carries it out to the street. It’s a pretty fine line between adequate watering w/o leakage. Generally if Iro thinks the zone moisture balance is greater than 100% then it’s likely leaking water that day.

Still not sure the reboot would really have anything to do with it…The physical device is just that, a physical devise. All the scheduling is held in the cloud and sent to the controller, so I don’t see how a reboot would change the functionality of the schedule in this manner.

From prior experience, eg Iro waters then forgets so it waters again the next day The only other change here was the scheduling time so I figure one or the other and I’d think other people would have a similar problem if due to scheduling. This isn’t the first problem resolved by a reboot so it seemed more likely.