My flex daily schedule isn’t watering my lawn to the full field capacity. Is that normal? I do have hard clay soil with a very slight slope, so maybe it’s not wanting to water more to protect from run-off? It still seems like it would be able to get to full field capacity to water deeper and less often and encourage better root growth. Am I missing something?
Yes, that’s normal. Your system won’t always fill your field capacity full. The soil helps to determine your capacity, but the actual run time of your sprinklers also involves nozzle precipitation rate, managed allowed depletion, and crop type (root zone depth).
Here’s a snapshot of my grass, you can see that it doesn’t always water to my full field capacity.
@Modawg2k, what are you setting on your grass right now? I’m assuming you flipped over to warm season grass? I flipped mine a few weeks ago and just set it to default for now, but it is watering every day. Grass looks awesome, and doesn’t seem overly saturated, but seems excessive…
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@tmcgahey I flipped over last month… I moved down my crop coefficient to 0.5 for awhile to help stress out the rye, but now I’m back to normal bermuda settings of 0.65. My grass is struggling a little bit in some areas, but I’m confident it will in strong.
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What does efficiency affect? Default is 80% (which seems high for sprinklers)…I have my root depth at 9".
What is your crop coefficient?
Efficiency will adjust how long your sprinklers run. Let’s say based off all your settings, Rachio wants to run Zone 1 for 10 minutes. If you change your efficiency down to 50%, you are telling the system that your grass is really only getting about 5 minutes worth of water, and it’ll water 50% longer… but don’t hold me to those numbers exactly, I’m just guessing.
If you have 100% efficiency, then the Rachio will only water as long as the settings determine (but no one gets 100%). I got my efficiency readings from using my Orbit catch cups which automatically give you that info.
I thought about using 9" for bermuda, but my run times were pretty long, and I never reached 9" last summer, so I stuck with 8" for now.
I’m using the 0.65 now since the rye is pretty much gone.
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Do you guys change your grass type because your lawns are seeded with multiple types? I have a cool season fescue, and my understanding was that the grass type setting was more for the actual variety of grass rather than the season. However, I completely understand why you’d be adjusting that if you have different varieties of grass in your lawn that you target for different types of year.
In Arizona (and other places) many of us overseed the bermuda in the winter since the bermuda goes dormant. I can’t speak for others, but Arizona is almost always overseeded with a ryegrass blend. So we adjust ours based on what grass is growing at that time (warm season or cool season).
That makes perfect sense. Thanks.