I bought the hose timer to help me deep water my trees. Right now I have to Quick Run each time I want to water. I water for about 20 minutes, then I want to let that soak in, then I water again. Repeat until that tree has had enough. Some trees need more time, some less. This isn’t the most efficient in that I forget I’m watering and my interval might be 1-2 hours or tomorrow!
What I wish it would do is let me set up one or more soak cycles plans. It could ask me how long I want to water and how many soaking “breaks” I want.
Watering Duration: 60 minutes
Number of Soaking Cycles: 2
Interval Between Cycles: 15 minutes
This would result in a total duration like this: 20 on - 15 off - 20 on - 15 off - 20 on.
Sure I can do this by setting a SCHEDULE, but if the schedules are disabled, you can’t use them. You have to give the schedule a start time. If I could set up a SCHEDULE that didn’t have a start time - just a MANUAL “quick run” start, this would be fine. Then I could set up a several “schedules” (all manual) for different lengths of watering. I go to Quick Run and select the pre-defined plan I want.
First off, is there a reason you wouldn’t just set this up as a schedule and let it run?
I haven’t played with my hose timer too much, but with the normal Rachio, when you do a quick run, you can choose to do a manual run, or run a schedule. Is that not available with the hose timer yet?
So I move the hose between trees so it’s not something that is dedicated to a specific area. Some trees need longer cycles, some shorter, so setting a “running” fixed schedule doesn’t fit my use case. I water a big maple once a week in the summer. The other trees get watered once a month or as needed.
I also have a quick connect on the timer, so I can move it to any of my three faucets easily. The amount of time depends on the area I’m watering as well, so it would be great to have preset schedules for 30 minutes, 60 minutes, etc. Think of it as “SPOT” watering.
I can do a Quick Run and set it for any amount of time I want, but it just runs for that amount of time and stops. I’m distracted a lot so I want the timer to do the work. I want it to water/wait/water/wait/water once I start it.
I can program a schedule for it, but the app blocks all my efforts to run that schedule in a manual way.
Figuring I couldn’t do it from Quick Run, I thought I could just set a schedule and go the schedule screen and run it… Nope. The only way to run a schedule “on-demand” is to EDIT the schedule and set a time for it to start 5 minutes into the future. That’s a PIA. I just want to do this sequence:
Tap “Quick Run”
Tap "
Tap “Run”
With the hose timer, you cannot pick a schedule from Quick Run… yet
