'Shrubs' being watered for excessively long period of time

I tried to setup flex daily for my zone marked as ‘shrubs’ but it wants to water for 2hr 43min which seems really excessive and do that run once a weekish. I’m just using default settings on an emitter. Is something off?

No, not really. The Rachio algorithms for Flex daily will water the way watering should be done, but most people don’t. To promote healthier plants, it is recommended to water for longer durations, less frequently.

That being said, if you previously watered multiple times a week, for 30 minutes at a time, you might run into some problems as the root structure has “learned” not to go deep for water. If this is your case, you might need to adjust some settings in order to bump the frequency up, while working to train those roots to go deep for water. The default “Nozzle Inches Per Hour” setting might also need to be adjusted depending on what type of emitters you have, and what their GPH is.

As a reference, my shrubs run for 3h29m, once a week or so in the summer, 10-12 days in the winter, with emitters that put out 1gph.

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Interesting. Found out they are producing 4gph on each of the plants. These are 1 and 5 gallon plants so should only need max of 6 inch radius of coverage so that gives me:
4gph->92 in^3/h / 3.14*6^2 = 8.18 in/hour
That really dropped the rate down

Ummm, not quite what I would come up with, but I find this guide VERY effective for calculating water needs. If you would like to walk thru how to use this calculator, I can help, but @azdavidr did a FANTASTIC job explaining the procedure.

But, I need to reiterate…if prior to Rachio you watered multiple times a week for shorter durations, you might find your plants struggling, so might need to tweak some things in order to “re-train” your plants.

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Wondering what would be a general strategy to safely train roots to go deeper? Previous owner of our property (Phoenix area) has mix of shrubs, trees, succulents being watered daily for up to 1 hour per zone in the summer. Tried cutting back by alternating days and shrubs started wilting by the second day so went back to daily schedule and just reduce duration as season changes. Just got a Rachio 3 but not ready for help with programming yet since the plants are probably not ready for that nor perhaps properly grouped by irrigation zone.