I am getting ready to plant winter seed here in Phoenix, AZ and I was creating a schedule for the start up to germination of the seed. I thought I was going to to be able to set one schedule to do intervals for so many min. I was looking to set up a schedule to water every 8-9 hours a day, for X number of min, for a few weeks and noticed the highest time interval is 6 hours.
Here is my suggestions.
Have more interval Options
Rachio Intelligently know my location, soil and suggest Winter Grass and Summer Grass watering Schedules that can be modified.
Intelligently reduce the water needs once the grass should be established to save water.
I see so many places over water winter grass here in Phx, AZ because the timing system are not smart enough and people forget to lower the number of times and length they are watering on the old style timers.
I first modified the zones to show 0.1" root depth.
I set the schedule to water daily for a max of 3 mins with a 6 hour soak / cycle time.
That made the system run 3 times per day every day.
I did a few quick runs to initially water in the grass seed. I would also do a couple of quick runs the first few days but my Fescue germinated in about 5 days. Some more came in over the next few days. I left it that way for about 2 weeks. I just now set up my 2 X week schedule but will quick run if I needed.
I just keep it simple for overseeding…I create 6 fixed schedules spread out every couple hours. After the first week, I’ll drop a couple, second week, a couple more, and once the grass is coming up, I’ll delete any remaining fixed schedules and let Flex Daily take over (of which I have changed to cool season grass, and changed the root depth to 2"). Has worked very well for me the last 4 years…
Some of the suggestions for overseeding schedules seem to imply that I don’t have to delete my normal flex schedules. When I go in to set up new fixed schedules for the overseeding the zones I can add are a blank list. I figure it is blank because all zones are already in a flex schedule. To make them available I have to delete the schedule they are in.
I don’t want to hassle with recording all my set up and having to reenter so for now I am watering zone by zone a couple times a day.
Either way is a hassle. Not even IFTTT has the option for setting up a fixed watering of all my zones . I love my Rachio but I could love it more if I could setup an alternate set of schedules for seeds.
I’m able to create fixed schedules on top of the flex daily schedule, and since it will be watering much more than flex normally would, it will just never run…but, I still usually disable flex daily.
Thank you for the tips. there are many ways to do this. I just set a schedule to fixed and then water every 4 hours for 2 minutes daily. Once the seed germinates. I will switch it to a cool season grass schedule with a sallow root depth.
