Hourly Watering Schedule

post by ddennis on Oct 11, 2018

I am trying to fine tune a watering schedule for seeding the lawn for winter. I have a schedule all setup and was setting it to water specific zones for a few min every hour or two. I would like it to only run between about 7a-8p. I don’t see any options to really setup something like this. I tried to set it to start at a specific time, 7a, but when you look at the main screen to see when it will run it was set to run through out the night and then into the next day for a bit and then it was off for about 14hrs and then started back up at like 1a, even though I set it to start at 7a. I’m sure I’m not setting up something correctly but I have been through all the functions of the schedule and I can’t see anyway to even come close to getting better control of this. Is there a way to set it to run every hour or every two hours between x-y times only.

post by franz on Oct 11, 2018

Unfortunately we don’t currently support a start/end time for hourly schedules. The product team is aware of this and is planning at some point on adding this behavior.

For now, you can create a fixed schedule that starts at a specific time. Then just use manual cycle/soak to act as your hourly “wait time” in between waterings. Set the soak time for 2 hours and then you can set the cycle time (watering) for whatever you need to end by 8pm. Take the total watering time for the zone (for example 60 minutes) and then just divide by the number of cycles you will have (every 2 hours until 8pm) to determine the zone cycle watering duration.

Hope this helps and just let us know if you have further questions.

post by ddennis on Oct 11, 2018

Appreciate it. I will look at it and make some modifications here in a bit.

post by Evyhb on Apr 29, 2020

I’m having the same issue: I need it to water for 1 minute every hour from 8am-8pm. I tried following the instructions above and it’s only set to go off once.

I tried the divide total time by hours and all that changed was it was set to run once for 12 minutes.

Any update on when we’ll be able to manually control this?

post by dale427 on Aug 28, 2021

This is exactly what I want to do. Run for 1 minute every hour through the night. I have a rabbit infestation issue in the neighborhood and this keeps them away from my grass. Can anyone tell me a simple (or difficult) way to do this?

post by Evyhb on Aug 28, 2021

I did a similar thing because I ran a line to give water to my chickens. You will have to set up multiple schedules and run them for a minute. Essentially you’ll want 1 schedule at 8pm to run for 1 min. Then another at 9:01 for 1 minute, so on and so forth.

post by rraisley on Aug 28, 2021

Why not use Cycle & Soak for this purpose. Say you want to start a 9 PM and water until 7 AM the next morning, for 1 minute every hour. That’s a total of 11 times 1 minute, 11 minutes total.

So, set up a Fixed schedule, to run every day, start at 9 PM, with a total watering time of 11 minutes. Then do a Manual Cycle & Soak, set the Cycle time to 1 minute, and the Soak time to 59 minutes. That should do what you want.

post by dale427 on Aug 28, 2021

Thanks. I’ll try that.

I set it up. Let’s see what happens.

post by johnpipi on Oct 9, 2023

Rachio this a joke. Why has this not been added yet its been years! I am a software engineer and this would literally take a few hours to add to your software… please add it or I will just reinstall my rainbird that can do this.

post by Mmmmkay on Jul 30, 2024

Hello… it’s been 6 years since the CTO said they would add an hourly watering schedule that would allow the user to set start and stop times. This doesn’t seem like a difficult feature. The suggestion about the water and soak it kind of a stupid over-engineered solution to a simple problem. I want my watering to start at this time to run for X min and then repeat on the hour y times. Repeat the next day. How do I do this? The soak thing doesn’t make sense.