Struggling to get settings right for drip

The best I can offer is this post if you haven’t seen it yet:

But I must admit even after reading it, I was still mostly confused. I’ve been trying to chase similar questions for the last week, but haven’t been making much progress really understanding how to combine drip with Rachio. I’m starting to get an impression that Rachio simply hasn’t been designed to work with drip irrigation. it’s primary (and maybe sole) use case is lawn irrigation as it assumes more or less uniform coverage.

A few days ago I started to to play around with some ideas using a zone with with a handful of young fruit trees (the only zone I have that is entirely drip and is made up of similar vegetation). I stumbled across a guide put out of the University of California, Davis on how to grow fruit trees (in CA) and it had a useful section on drip irrigation. The one take away for me was that when on low-flow drip emitters, trees should be watered daily. There is also a table of how much water trees need based on their size and a few other conditions.

So I set the zone’s efficiency to 100%, Available Water to 100%, and Allowed Depletion to 1% (to force daily watering). And now I’m just manually tweaking Nozzle Inch per Hour to get watering durations that will give me amounts of water that match the numbers in the table I mentioned above (I also have different number of emitters per tree to compensate for variation in tree sizes).