2020 Settings used by Advanced and Flex Schedules

post by cman on Jun 16, 2020

I am loving the product so far, but what I am finding is that the majority of articles found that discuss Advanced settings and what is used by Flex schedules seem to be really old, pre-18. Are there any articles that discuss what is support in 2020? I am really starting to dig into the Advanced settings and wanting to set up the Flex Daily. But, when I research it is all old information and before Flex schedules utilized most of the Advanced settings. Is this left in the same state or were improvements made?

Also, where is everyone finding their crop coefficients? I see average seems to be best used, but how is that average or how is it determined?

post by franz on Jun 16, 2020

The articles should be up-to-date, those schedules really haven’t changed in that time span.

I would use the defaults for each crop type unless you feel the system is over or under watering.

post by cman on Jun 16, 2020

What I am finding is that Flex Monthly seems to run each zone 19-28 minutes based on shade and slope. But when I move to Flex Daily those times increase to a flat 38mins per zone. It doesn’t seem to factor in something, or maybe Flex Monthly is taking something into consideration that it shouldn’t.

post by tmcgahey on Jun 17, 2020

Flex daily takes into account more than monthly will. Daily will water in a way that will promote the healthiest most drought-tolerant plants. For this reason, it waters for longer durations, but less frequently.

post by cman on Jun 17, 2020

Thanks @tmcgahey. I slept on this exact same thought. I was wondering if it was watering longer to “fill the bucket”. Then allowing it to reach the 50% mark before running again. I first set up the flex daily just to see the run times and I noticed that it was only running up to 85% fill, so I really only had a 35% to play with. Any reason this is done instead of filling to 90% or greater and actually having a 50% delay before the next run time.

I’ll probably take @franz tride and true suggestion of only setting up one or two zones to see what exactly happens, then go from there.

post by tmcgahey on Jun 17, 2020

Because Flex Daily runs a fixed duration. If you don’t make any settings changes, the duration of the run won’t change, only the frequency of the run. It may take 2 days for it to get down enough to kickstart a run, and then it may be at 100%+, and then may take 3-4 days for it to kickstart a run.

The main thing with Flex Daily is making sure that you have ALL the zone parameters dialed in as much as possible. Other issues people see are with their prior manual watering; they watered frequently, for a short duration. Just the opposite of Flex Daily. This causes short root depth since the roots don’t have to go deep for water. If this is you, it might take some time, playing with the root depth setting, to re-train your roots to dig deeper and build up to those long, infrequent waterings.

post by cman on Jun 17, 2020

@tmcgahey, Thanks! My plan is to leave it on Monthly for now. I will pick up catch cups this weekend to dial in the sprinkler settings. From what Franz was saying it seems crop coefficients do not change. I’m assuming the default AW is based on the soil type selected? So I could leave that setting alone too. I would just need to take into account area and Nozzles Inch per hour. Efficiency could be determined when I do catch cups I believe. Is there a handy calculator that you could input all your measurements to get efficiency? Or, what is the formula? I’ll do some community searches here in a bit to see if this has been discussed already.