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Why Are Run Times Different?

Schedules & Zones
#1

I’ve been running a Flex Daily schedule for a couple of years now. I made a ton of adjustments last year that took a lot of time, but now I am thinking that maybe I overdid things in order to justify shorter watering duration and days. That said, I went back and set everything to default. My total run time now is 3 hrs and 41 min. whereas before it was 2 hrs and 49 min.

My question is this; on two of my rotar zones (4 of my 6 zones are rotar and the other 2 are fixed) I have the settings setup exactly the same, so I would expect the run times to also be the same. Well, they are not. Zone 4 is running for 44 min. and zone 5 is running for 37 min.

Why would there be a 7 min. difference in these two zones when they are setup identical in the settings?

#2

@drew_thayer is looking into this for me. I posted similar the other day. I assumed it was due to me testing and making a bunch of changes to the adaptive watering beta feature.

#3

Thank you for the reply. Well, since I don’t have the adaptive watering beta feature, I guess we can now assume that it’s a global issue.

Not sure if I should adjust the other 3 zones that are setup the same as this one down to 37 min. or adjust this zone up to 44 min. like the other 3? I am thinking I may adjust down the others to match the 37 min. run time.

#4

@MichaelS76 I’m going to investigate your situation as well; I’ll follow up in a DM. Thanks for posting.

#5

Thank you for checking on this.

#6

I’ve reported this as well in the past. Eventually I did a factory reset of the entire controller. Then I left things alone for a short time, and everything settled back in.

In my scenario it was the dynamic crop coefficient, when I would turn that off and set to static then I was getting even run durations. Even tho crop coefficient wasn’t supposed to affect run times.

#7

That’s interesting. I’m trying to avoid doing an entire reset of the controller since I don’t really want to spend the time again setting everything up. I adjusted the rotor zones down from 44 to 37 so they all now match. I guess I’ll just see how things go going forward.

#8

Are you manually adjusting the run times? Keep in mind once you manually adjust the times in the flex schedule I’ve seen where any changes in the advanced settings won’t accurately affect the correct durations.

#9

Yeah, I manually dropped down 3 of the zones from 44 min runtime to 37 min.

I’m wondering if I should just try resetting everything back to default again and start over. Or maybe even deleting my Daily Flex Schedule and starting over so everything matches. I don’t want to have to manually adjust the run times and throw off other settings.

Sometimes simple things with this controller get VERY confusing…

#10

I’d say leave it for now until Drew can look into it. Hopefully whatever is causing it can be found and a fix can be put in place.

#11

@MichaelS76 did you have, or use the adaptive watering feature in the past?

#12

I don’t have that functionality in my app or on the web.

#13

I’ve discover that manually adjusting the run time is not a good way to do things. I Don’t manually manipulate the time anymore. Adjusting the settings to change it instead has worked much better for me.

#14

I agree with that and that was the original reason why I went back to my default settings in the first place. After going back to the default settings and run times, that is when I began to notice the different run times of zones that have identical settings. That’s the current predicament I’m in now.

#15

Usually after manually changing the times, and after defaulting the settings you’ll need to delete the schedule and re-create it. I recently did this with a neighbor and everything went back to normal. However, there was that time about a month ago now, where that wasn’t working for me and I was getting different run times even with having the same exact settings on all the zones. That’s what caused me to factory reset, and not even that worked. I then just left it alone for a few days, defaulted, and re did the schedule and it has been fine since then. In the time that I left it alone for those few days I had turned dynamic crop off and went to static because for whatever reason that’s what was causing the different run times (even though crop coefficient has no bearing on run times only on frequency). Nonetheless I left it on static for a few days and then went back to turn on dynamic and everything was fine, nothing changed on the schedule. I’ve left it alone since then, since I believe I pretty much have it dialed in, if not very close to it, just need to see the fall and spring seasons now.

#16

I’m thinking that’s what I may end up doing here eventually. I was trying to avoid that, but not sure what other options I have at this point.

#17

Ideally, I would (if you can) wait for @drew_thayer to look into it in hopes they can find the root cause of the issue and perform a fix for it. That would ensure stuff like this gets fixed in the future and having the team understand what happened here.

#18

A simple reason for this could be the zone size, how many heads you have, sun coverage, etc. None of my zones are the same size, nor do they have the same amount of sun coverage. So I don’t expected any zone to have the same watering run time.

#19

And are you sure they have all the same exact settings? Like shade or not shade? Type of grass and such… not just coefficient and so on.

#20

Yes. Zone type, spray head, soil, exposure, slope and advanced settings are all the same.

The only difference is the area square footage, but they are different for every zone and from what I understand that does not affect run time.