Summary

Flex Daily schedules work a bit differently than your conventional sprinkler schedule. Like a self-driving car, the controller is smart enough to drive itself; all you have to do is tell it what days it's allowed to water and it will water each zone on its own schedule. Watering is based on the estimated moisture level of each zone using the irrigation principal  Management Allowed Depletion. This article will help you with how to set up a Flex Daily Schedule the right way. 

Steps to create a schedule

1) Schedules tab

Navigate to the Schedules tab of the Rachio app. You will then be led to his screen, where you can select "Create Schedule" at the bottom of your screen.

2) Schedule Type

You will be asked to select the type of schedule to create:

3) Zone Selection

You will be asked to select which zones you'd like to add to the schedule. (This can be edited at any time)

4) Name Schedule

Select a name for your new schedule.

5) Interval/Frequency Selection

Select days or the interval you wish to water.

6) Select the Schedule Timing

7) Smart Watering Features

You'll have the opportunity to disable any Smart Watering Features you do not wish to use.

 NOTE:  All Smart Watering Features are enabled by default.

Smart Features

Smart Cycle (Automated Cycle Soak)

When running a watering schedule with Smart Cycle toggled on, Rachio will break up the total watering time for each zone into a number of cycles. For each cycle, a zone is watered for a period of time that matches the infiltration rate of your soil. During this process, it's important that the soil in each zone gets enough time to absorb the water; the controller schedules at least 30 minutes between each watering cycle on the zone. For more details, please see:  Smart Cycle FAQ

*Flexible Daily schedules cannot edit or disable certain Weather Intelligence features.  This is due to the dynamic use of moisture calculations and ET data in Flex scheduling, which renders these options unnecessary. For more info on how this works, see our Flex Daily FAQ

8) Schedule Summary

Using the zone settings entered during the zone setup, Rachio will calculate the water required to fill the root zone given the water holding capacity of your soil. The time to complete the watering is dependent on the spray head type selected. You can edit the durations in minute-by-minute increments. These adjustments can be made to any, some, or all zones. Press "Next" to save.

There are some important things to understand about Flex schedules so please be sure to review our  Flex Schedule Overview and our  Flex Daily Schedule FAQ. This will dive into some of the nuances that help explain what we are doing more specifically.

Flex Daily Schedule Recommending 0 minutes?

Here's why:

In some areas in Canada and especially for international customers outside the US/Canada, the Rachio system cannot pull ET (evapotranspiration) data from the Weather System, causing issues with the schedule’s creation and behavior.

ET data is used alongside the zones’ settings to calculate the recommended duration for each zone, depending on the calculated speed it takes to evaporate the water from the soil. That varies depending on the location, so if we’re missing the values, the system cannot recommend a duration accurately.

Things to try:

For these customers, we suggest using a Fixed Schedule until our team of developers and engineers can create a software workaround to fix the issue for Canadian customers.

Another possibility is to temporarily switch the controller’s location to somewhere in the US, create the schedule, and then move it back to the original location. Please note that this workaround will require the user to monitor if the Flex Daily Schedule is operating properly as we may have issues with the moisture tracking if data points are missing.

Do you still need help?

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