Monday was 51-73, Tuesday was 52-81, today was warm with 58-91. Tomorrow looking at 70-91, Friday 55-88, Saturday 49-72.
I am inclined to skip until I am sure my settings are all correct, as about 1/3 of the zones are still soggy/squishy when walked on.
So did you manually stop each zone short of its scheduled run time?
It feels like your pr is set WAY too low, we will see when you get your catch cups filled, but my gut tells me your pr for the rotors is going to be .85-1.2 inch and your spray heads are going to be 1.5-2 inches.
I let the zones all run as scheduled today, which was about 6 hours for 8 zones. upon noticing the saturated nature of the ground, I filled the moisture for the pertinent zones since the program would run that zone again a day later. Now, those zones are set to run on Friday, and the zones I didn’t fill would run tomorrow. I plan on just doing a rain delay in order to prevent another pretty full watering tomorrow.
What i also found odd was how quickly it calculated moisture from rainfall to have depleted, given the mild temps. We had 1.75" of rain followed by two days of temps in the 50s to low 70s, and by the third day program said it was at MAD.
Yea, go into rain delay.
Can you post a screen shot of the moisture details for this zone?
Sure. Before doing rain delay, I filled the water level on two of the zones attached - you will see where I did that. I was hopeful this would prevent watering for a few days, but it seems to still show rapid depletion. The last image (front lawn) I did nothing to (did not fill this zone).
Sorry, did not notice the front lawn image did not load. here it is (and this is the one I did not “fill”):
I’m wondering if your soil might be something that holds water better than sandy loam soil does. I know you did the mason jar test, but based on what you are saying about your yard holding the water and the mushrooms growing, you might want to try changing it to a soil type that holds, say loam, or maybe even clay loam.
I know that in my own case, I have silty clay soil, but I have a shady flat spot in my back yard that does not drain well and I have had to define it as clay.
Good idea. I can always do a test from that particular zone, too.
ok, so after some work, i think i found a possible issue that could be causing your problem. first ill describe what i did so that @franz can verify that my test is valid.
i setup a zone with 8 inch root depth that was fully depleted with mad set at 75%. then i adjusted the mad on the zone to 25%.
this causes the schedule duration to be decreased to the point to where the water applied will not reach 100%, so my flex daily schedule for my deck pots zone and patio zones started running every day.
@franz am i overlooking anything, if someone wants too look at my data, its on the “when i drip you drip we drip” schedule. i have also enabled a nonexistant zone to reproduce this again without throwing any water. if this is wrong let me know, ill remove the post…
@Dclumes to work past this problem you have to water your zone to satisfaction and then use the fill button on the zone to establish proper starting point.
@plainsane Thanks for this. I have noticed a significant decrease in the watering frequency for the zones I filled. Right now things are looking pretty normal, schedule-wise. Specifically, I ran a watering this AM, with the next scheduled on Sunday, and with the next one after that being on the following Sunday. Hopefully I will be able to run a catch cup test today to get an idea on the PR.
However, I still find the moisture level chart odd. For example, my front lawn zone (which I never filled) will get .36 inch of precipitation via watering by the program. This would reflect 42% moisture. The following day, it shows complete depletion to 0% moisture. See below:
Do you suggest I just fill any recently watered zones and see if the depletion does not occur so rapidly? my rear lawn close zone, which I filled on the 17th (due to soggy conditions), depleted from 111% on the 17th to 53% on the 18th. Even though it was not at MAD, it watered this morning, bringing the current moisture balance to .38 inches (106%).
Essentially, it seems like the program shows pretty rapid depletion. As suggested by Linn, perhaps I should change my soil type?
your first moisture graph is what i was able to recreate at the house…i am pretty convinced this is a bug in flex, or maybe an undocumented feature…
i recommend you fill the zones that are showing this short fall, where a watering event partially fills the zone. if you want to water the zone to “fill” them up physically, you can, that is up to you, im not sure your moisture levels
My moisture levels all seem fine at the moment. However, based on the second graph, it appears filling does not fix the issues of rapid depletion, and watering before MAD was reached.
ill see what i can come up with on the second graph, it shouldnt have run, that is so weird.
Thanks for all the assistance. I may not be able to run the catch test today - do you recommend I rain delay until after the weekend? It is scheduled to run sunday, but my wife noticed some mushrooms in the front yard as well - ha!
sure, at least until you think it has dried out.
Will do. grass is still springing back despite 90 degree weather today.
@plainsane, I agree with you that it could be a bug, but since the precip prediction is only .03in, could it be a prediction change from the hour before watering was supposed to start and the time of the moisture level chart that we are seeing? If the prediction earlier had been just .01in, it would have needed to water.
@plainsane ran a quick catch cup test, but don’t think the numbers were very accurate so will run another in a few days
However, certain areas of the lawn are in two zones. I didn’t entirely understand the best method to calculating the pr in these situations, as if I just used the collected amount from one zone (for determining pr) it would likely result in overwatering, correct?
Well even if predicted was .01, that would put the zone at 0, maybe predicted dropped to zero so mad would be negative and that is why it ran, you just wish the numbers lined up a little better. Look at the graph before that, mad clearly went negative before a watering event, something just feels a little inconsistent.
Dude, I don’t know what to do on these boundaries. To rachio, they are descrete entities so I would compute them as such, it’s really going to drag down your efficiency. If the zones have the same characteristics, aka sun and vegetation, you could run both zones with some cups in the overlap. You have to keep these 2 zones in step, aka, if either is going to run without the adjacent zone, empty its companion so they both run. I’m not a fan of how this works, but zones are often split because of water pressure and there is no real hard boundary when this decision is required.
