Watering at Night with Flex Daily

Schedules & Zones Flex Daily
1

My Flex Daily schedule for my Generation 3 currently waters around 11:00 at night. (Based in south Jersey near Philadelphia.)

However, I’ve read numerous recommendations that watering at night can lead to fungus and bacterial diseases. See, for example:

  • Watering Lawn At Night: Good For Your Grass or Bad Idea? (“Many fungal and bacterial diseases that can harm your lawn and your plants thrive in wet foliage. With no hot sun to burn it off, excess water just sits there. All. Night. Long. It’s like you’re turning your lawn into a petri dish and trying to breed bacterial and fungal diseases”)

  • Lawn Problems & Watering at Night (“If you water lawn at night in summer, the lack of evaporation provides time for the pathogens to infiltrate your grass.”)

  • The Smarter Way to Water Your Lawn (“watering at night is about the worst thing you can do to a lawn”).

I know I can “force” Flex Daily to avoid nighttime watering and water in the early morning, which appears to be the consensus for the recommended time. For example, I saw this related post: Watering times? Water in the morning.

My question is, why does Flex Daily appear to default to a time that seems counter to expert recommendations and detrimental to my lawn?

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@dlam Rachio is used by a very wide variety of people with lots of different needs. They allow you to change just about everything. Rachio can’t know in advance how long your schedule will run. I suspect that you have set your schedule up to either complete by sunrise or complete by some time in the morning. In this case, Rachio just backs up the start time so the watering will finish when you told it to. If you have a long watering time because of the number of zones, the type of watering, or some other reason then you have the option of specifying when Rachio should start to water instead of when it should finish watering, so just tell it to start later - say 3am - instead of 11pm. That’s not “forcing” it to water in the morning. It is settiing up Rachio for your particular circumstances.

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