Saturation Skip, but no precip for 12 days

I’ve been using a 16 and 8 zone Gen 3 since 7/21/18. All seemed great at first, however I’m running into an inordinate number of Saturation Skips the past couple of weeks. I run a fixed schedule with a single station weather option selected in my Weather Network . I’ve double checked my zone settings and all seem correct.

Today is 9/5 and the last time we had any precipitation was on 8/23. That day showed just over a half inch of rain. The weather has been very humid. I was attributing the saturation skips to the fact that perhaps the soil was holding moisture longer due to the humidity. But after 12 days of saturation skips, my lawn is starting to show signs of distress.

I’ve turned off saturation skip, until I can get a handle on this. I was hoping Franz or someone with more experience than me might offer additional suggestions. Thanks.

@EdL Assuming this is for your C3-Daily schedule (at least as an example). The reason you are having saturation skips is that it is an every day schedule. According to your zone characteristics and our understanding of the soil moisture depth, from day-to-day your soil is not depleted enough to water. Maybe as the season gets cooler we are determining you could skip a day. It doesn’t always have to do with precipitation since you are irrigating daily. We also know that the next watering day is essentially tomorrow which allows us to infer you can make it to that next day. Saturation skip doesn’t really work well with every day schedules. This could also be a sign that you might be watering too much. Here is some more information regarding saturation skips.

:cheers:

@franz Thanks for the quick response. I didn’t realize that every day schedules would have this kind of effect on the Saturation Skip. I’ll monitor ongoing results with this in mind.

Not sure if you noticed, but on my 16 zone unit I was having a similar issue with the schedules that ran every other day. Just not as long of a period being effected by the saturation skip.

Thanks again for the guidance.

Thanks for the further information @EdL. Schedules that do run frequently (i.e. every day, every other day) are definitely more susceptible to saturation skips since the zones are being irrigated more often which is effectively filling their soil moisture buckets. Either the zone characteristics need some fine tuning or they are being over watered. Have a great day!

:cheers:

Thanks again @franz .