Hi @twin1,
As the data scientist I helped design the Adaptive Watering adjustment feature and I’m happy to explain it to you. We are still working on an article which I’ll share once it’s published.
Adaptive Watering gives you options to water a little/lot more or a little/lot less for each of your zones. It works on all 3 schedule types, but the functionality is a little different. Asking for “a little more” will increase your zone runtime duration by 20%. Asking for “a lot more” will increase by 60%. Adjustments are additive and can be stacked (e.g. +60% - 20% = +40%). The percentage is relative to runtime calculated from your default settings.
For Fixed schedules, this is it. For the Flex schedules, we calculate a maximum runtime based on the average evapotranspiration and your zone settings; watering beyond this cap may cause runoff and waste. So on a Flex schedule, if you ask for more water and the new runtime exceeds this calculated threshold, the system will instead decrease your frequency, then calculate a new runtime that will result in the average weekly runtime increasing by 20%.
For Flex Monthly, which runs on regular intervals (i.e. every 3 days), this would decrease the interval (in this case to every 2 days). For Flex Daily, which is stochastic because it tracks real-time weather forecasts, the effect is hard to predict without knowing the forecast precisely, but the average effect of asking for “more water” and surpassing the threshold is that your zone will water more frequently.
The idea behind this feature is to allow customers to dial in their watering and compensate for inaccurate parameters. For example, we use published manufacturers’ flow rates to estimate the precipitation rates of a variety of sprinkler heads. However, a customer with an old irrigation system that perhaps has some leaks, or low water pressure, will not get the manufacturer’s spec output when they run a zone, and will deliver less water per minute than we are modeling. This customer could ask for “a little more” etc with Adaptive Watering and tune their zone until it is watering to their satisfaction.
If any of this doesn’t make sense, or you have any further questions, please reach out.