New Setup - Water Scheduling Too Short?

[djcentinno]

My lawn is green almost 99% of the time all year due to the watering schedule I had been doing with a very old Hunter irrigation system. I would normally do my first two Zones at 25 to 35, then Zone 3 (rotors) at 30 - 60, depending on the season. I live near in Southwest Florida and have St. Augustine grass.

I setup the Rachio 3 recently and am completely shocked by the new watering times based on the information I’ve put in for Zones using Flex Monthly. It is cutting those times almost in half (or more) and I just can’t believe this is right. We have mostly Myakka sand and water capacity near .09 cm (.04in).

How can this new irrigation system…which has rave reviews possibly continue giving me a green lawn all year with less watering times? April is less of course, but in the summer it’s everyday (but we do usually get an afternoon shower everyday as well).

Any information on whether this makes sense or I should manually adjust to what I had before will be greatly appreciated. Also…how will Smart Cycle work with this since it is enabled?

[rraisley]

IF your nozzle flow rates are really 1.5 inches per hour, 11 minutes of watering will give you about 0.18" of water per watering. That’s probably a reasonable value if you water every day, and at the current time. Flex Monthly will increase the time when warmer weather arrives, changing every month.

But my experience is that few systems actually produce 1.5 inches per hour. If there is a way you could measure the gallons of flow to each zone for a given time, and also the square feet of area for each zone, we could determine pretty accurately if the 1.5 applies to you or not. My guess is, it’s high, and when adjusted correctly, the watering times would be longer. But that’s just a guess.