Understanding Schedules - Here’s your hot weather handbook

Rachio’s smart watering schedules have some great features to reduce water waste during varied weather conditions. But during the summer, the issue is often not enough water. Here is how each schedule type approaches summer weather:

• Fixed schedules run for a set duration on specific days; they do not increase watering during the summer.
  • Seasonal Shift is a free feature that can be turned on in your Fixed schedule settings and will increase/decrease watering durations monthly based on historical weather normals. This means longer run times during the summer to help meet increased irrigation demand.
• Much like Fixed Schedules with Seasonal Shift, Flex Monthly schedules update monthly based on historical weather normals, automatically modifying duration and frequency of your watering schedule.
  • If your water district enacts watering restrictions, you can set a Flex Monthly schedule to only allow watering on certain days, without having to convert to a Fixed schedule. The algorithm will decide whether or not watering is required on those allowed days (this is the key difference with Fixed).
• Flex Daily (Advanced) schedules look out over a controller’s forecast and take historical data into account to offset the expected evapotranspiration of your plants.
  • This does increase watering for summer weather by watering more frequently, but not for longer durations. Some users may find that they need to add additional watering time or Quick Runs during exceptionally hot stretches.

Free For All

All schedule types can take advantage of these three Rachio features:

• Need to increase your watering? Tap Adjust Watering on a schedule or upcoming run to easily increase/decrease your watering times manually.
• Want to get the most out of your water? Make sure the Smart Cycle feature is enabled. This breaks up long run times, giving water time to soak in and helps avoid runoff.
• Changes to your yard? Double-check your zone settings to make sure they are still accurate. It’s possible that a neighbor trimmed a tree and your front zone now gets lots of sun instead of being mostly shaded. Or maybe you have updated nozzles with different flow rates.

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