You might be on to something here! This doesn’t make any sense and I do not recall ever seeing this nor manually setting anything here. This should be “default” - whatever that means. I intend[ed] for this to be 100% determined by the FlexDaily algorithms.
Well that is FANTASITC news!
Trying to think the best way to get those back to the “default” values. I think deleting the schedule and re-creating it might be the best. Not sure if removing just that one zone and adding it back will bring back the defaults or not…but you can try it!
Easy to find out. Simply change, say, the Inches per Hour to a different value. Save everything, update, then go back in and change the Inches per Hour to the correct figure. Update (F5 on a PC), go to your Schedule, Update/F5 again (just to be sure), and click on Duration, and see how long it intends to water that zone. You should also be able to confirm the amount of water being applied from the charts.
Thanks for the Charts, btw, it now shows the correct 0.84" I mentioned above as being the water to be applied. And it’s applying that about once a week.
I’m guessing the new watering time will be about 44 minutes. (There I am again, sticking my neck out.)
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And also regarding the 1 minute vs. 2 minutes, I’ve noticed it on my Gen1 (not so much on my Gen3’s) that there are times where the first minute doesn’t register in history…mute point for me since my shortest zones run for over an hour each, so I never worried about it…
I deleted the entire schedule, and setup a new one (all defaults). Yes the answer is 44 minutes (give the man a cigar!)
I note there is some strange results for my drip zones that I will look at - I never paid much attention to this before.
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Weird in what way? Those drip times are pretty close to what I see for mine…unless you have some really high output drip or bubblers, your previous times were really low, IMHO. We can work on those next! 
[modest mode]Aw, shucks, t’weren’t nuthin’[/modest mode]
Drip zones can run a long time, and often are best on their own separate schedule, running during the day. But you know the drill: Let’s see the Properties & Advanced Properties. 
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Ok here are the Zone properties for the Backyard Trees. I suspect I am confused about describing trees as “square feet” – this is coming back to me.
the watering duration with that setup is
Zone setup looks good, other than possibly nozzles inches per hour. Root depth could be more, could be less depending on the age of the trees, but that is only going to change frequency of run. I personally don’t worry about the area, it is only used to calculate gallons used/saved on the home page, and is REALLY hard to get right for drip.
What type of irrigation do you have for the trees? Emitters? How many GPH do they put out? How many per tree?
Well, all those values sound reasonable, so let’s put a bit of math to it:
Total irrigation water at once = 0.17 x 25.59 x 0.5 = 2.175"
Divide inches of water by Nozzle Inches per Hour = 2.175 / 0.5 = 4.35 hours.
90% Efficiency will increase this by 1 / (0.4 + 0.6 x 0.9) = 1.063, so 1.063 x 4.35 = 4.63 hours = 4 hours 38 minutes (close to the listed 4:23, but no cigar). Still, close.
The only things possibly in doubt would be root depth (can vary with size of trees), and Nozzle Inches per Hour (I’ll let tmcgahey comment on that).
I probably have 2 emitters @ 1 gph each per tree. (Approx… some have emitter/tube style) but total of 2 gph per tree is not a bad guess.
This user form for drip is nuts — “in/hr” for a tree???
Boy, if you are truly only putting down 2 gph on a tree, that run time is WAAAAAAAAY low. I have most of my trees with anywhere from 4-8 2gph emitters (8-16 gallons total per hour), and my zones run for over 4h.
Depending on the canopy size of the tree, you should be putting down 20+ gallons just to wet the root zone. That would mean you should be running that zone for 10 hours. Might need to do a bit more investigating on what you have so that we can better dial things in.
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They are smaller trees - like 4 or 5 ft canopy (20 gal). And I might be way off on the guess for # of emitters since they are drip-lines. Let’s say the trees each get 4 gph from the emitters, so maybe the 4:38 in the schedule is not that far off from the target of 5 hrs. If I want to get a bit more watering time, what would I change? Reduce the Nozzle Inches per Hour I assume…
It seems overly complicated for drip setup — “Tree”, the table above plus the emitter gph should be all that is needed (besides soil type). Why do they make me look at this in inches/hour and square feet?
A just read that a small tree requires about 20 gallons of water per 1" of trunk per week. So that would give you your 4 gph x 5 hours. As you say, seems about right. And trees can be watered once a week, or even less, without a problem.
Yes, lowering the Nozzle Inches per Hour increases watering time.
IMHO, way too complex. But the alternative, asking you how many trees, what size emitter and how many on each and every tree, etc. is even more complex. tmcgahey will recommend a spreadsheet to give the proper values, but I found the spreadsheet more complex than my own calculations (of course I’m an engineer, so love calculations /and/ spreadsheets), so I made up my own.
In your case, if you like the 5 hour figure, I would either 1) Play with the Nozzle In/hr figure until you get 5 hours with Flex Daily, or 2) Use a Fixed schedule for watering once a week, set it for 5 hours, and turn on Seasonal Shift. That will give you more water in warm weather, less in cooler weather.
Square feet isn’t needed for this purpose. Leave it blank if you want. Like I said, all that does is calculate the water uses/saved in gallons if you choose to have Rachio show you that on the home page.
There is an excel file created by a member that really makes it stupid simple to calculate. At one point, Rachio was going to use it in their documentation. To help you calculate it, all I need is the number from the moisture chart showing how much water Rachio wants to put down, in inches for that tree zone.
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Thanks to both of you @tmcgahey, @rraisley and @Alturia for the great help. I/we still don’t know how Rachio got all confused on this, but I am good now with a fresh schedule.
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Here is the details of the excel file that a member made. This is just an example using my flex daily watering requirements, along with your GPH per plant (4 gph) and average canopy size (requiring 22 gallons per watering). If you can get me the value from your system on what that zone wants to water on a given cycle, you can plug that adjust the custom nozzle PR. For this example, you would want to set your nozzle inches per hour to .37". While not required, you could calculate your area from this chart also…
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Your math makes me happy.
I especially like when you show your work for extancredit
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