We have one zone that is set up with a fixed schedule. It is a perennial plant zone that waters a flower bed at the front of our yard next to a sidewalk with full sun exposure. Due to this in July we had some plant stress showing up so I manually set the zone to water every day to help the plants out. The system set the watering time to 6m.
This morning seasonal shift was applied to this zone for August and the system set it to every 4 days for 23m. Since we’re still going to get 90deg days in August I thought this a little aggressive and changed the schedule to see what would happen with the times. When I set to every 2 days the time dropped to 8m. When I then set the interval back to 4 days, the time only went to 15m, quite a bit different than the 23m set by the season shift.
My question is, what’s up with this? Does manually touching the schedule change something about how the system calculates water requirements? If so this seems in error.
@theflexdude - In response to your email question: I was doing some work on my sprinklers yesterday so there were some manual runs, but to the best of my memory (hah), no I didn’t change anything on the schedule for the plant zone yesterday. I do assume, however, that you guys can check my memory by referring to the records on the servers.
@davelr I looked up your device and here are the updates that I found to that schedule (times in UTC):
13:13:04 change to every 4 days -> 1350 seconds result duration
13:13:15 change to every 2 days -> 720 seconds result duration 13:13:42.554 change to every 3 days -> 1080 seconds result duration 13:13:42.731 change duration to 720 seconds (33.333% decrease)
13:13:54.835 change to every 4 days -> 1350 seconds computed duration minus 33.333% adjustment -> 900 second result duration
Note the duplicate update that happened at 13:42. What happened is the same form every 3 days / 720 seconds got submitted twice (so first submission adjusted interval and second adjusted duration back to what it was for 2 day interval). This could be due to a browser or could be due to our web app defect. We haven’t seen an issue like this before and I am having web team investigate further to see if it’s a software issue. To remove adjustment you can adjust the durations back to 23m or create a new schedule. Let me know if you have more questions and thanks for pointing this out.
@theflexdude, thanks for the quick info on this. So at this point “we” don’t think it’s something I screwed up? Hopefully… Anyway, what I’ll do is delete and recreate the schedule to see what happens. I know the initial change to 4 days was not something that I did, so assumed that seasonal shift did it. I was surprised to see it so close to the shift to 2 days which I did after noticing the 4 day interval. I’m confused… Is the 33% adjustment what should be applied for the August shift? Just rambling here, sorry.
Edit: Deleted and recreated the schedule. The times were set as per the 33% reductions shown in your logs. Initially I set a 2 day schedule then changed it to 4 day and then back to 2 day. Run times were all as per the 33% reduction. These were done on the Android app, not web. As a note, I am assuming that I did not make the initial shift of this zone to 4 day, at least deliberately. However I have had “unexplained” schedule changes occur when working on the sprinklers in the past - wet phone, jamming in pocket, etc. When this occurred before I posted a suggestion that you guys consider putting a PIN lock feature on configuration changes, so thought I’d offer that up again.
Seasonal shift does not adjust interval on fixed schedule just duration based on user given interval. It was a user request from Android App on 2018-07-31 17:47:32,70 UTC. Looks like a number of zones were also deleted from schedule during that time.
No. 33% is the user duration adjustment that will remain in affect for all months, relative to durations recommended for the month. It was introduced by duration update to 720 seconds immediately after the interval. We are not certain if it was a double-click or something else as of now. We will keep researching and will watch if this issue persists with other clients/users.
On a brand new schedule durations should not be decreased by 33% unless the durations are decreased during the creation. Looks like august recommended for 4 day interval is 15 minutes. So you should be good to go. This means that the durations were initially increased by user at some point, then got decreased back during a sequential update.
@theflexdude, thanks for all your help on this, I think I have a better understanding of what was going on now and doubt that it was due to anything on your end. Couple of comments for anyone else who may run into this type of problem:
I didn’t realize that manual changes to run times would be propagated through a schedule forever. Makes sense, but wasn’t obvious to me.
Since both of my events of “magical” schedule changes have happened when I’ve been working on the sprinklers, I’m sure that random touchscreen inputs while the phone was in my pocket (wet, moving around…) were the cause of these changes, however improbable that may seem. I’ve adopted a new technique for testing sprinkler setups. Run a test of sprinklers, stop test of sprinklers, close the app, shut off phone (sleep), put in pocket. Short of some type of optional configuration lock this is the only way I could come up with to prevent this from happening in the future.
