Topic(s): ProgrammingWeather
How does Automatic Seasonal Adjust work?
Turn on the “Automatic Seasonal Adjust” switch in the Rain Bird App to save as much as 30% of your scheduled watering per year.
In the simplified monthly watering use chart above the dark blue section represents the actual watering needs for a landscape, and the light blue represents watering that happens if you run the same watering schedule for the whole year without making adjustments. By using Automatic Seasonal Adjust you eliminate the watering that is not needed. This happens on a monthly and a daily basis.
Once Automatic Seasonal Adjust is turned on a new daily seasonal adjust value is sent to the controller every night. The amount of watering time reduced compared to the original run time scheduled can be seen on the Seasonal Adjustment bar below each Program or Zone Card.
In the program above the original watering run time was 40 minutes, and the Seasonal Adjust was changed from 100% to 70%, so the new watering run time is 28 minutes.
You can also turn on a “Automatic Seasonal Adjust Applied” notification in the Controller Settings if you would like to see the new watering percent adjust every day.
When scheduling run times while using Automatic Seasonal Adjust it is important to set run times for the hottest, driest time of the year.
Your Automatic Seasonal Adjustment percentage value may be different than you’d predict for any particular day. An adjustment value of 100% is representative of irrigation during the average hottest time of year, so even if you are experiencing warm weather on a summer day, you may not see an adjustment above 100%.
The three factors Rain Bird considers when creating your daily automatic seasonal adjustment values are:
- Historical average weather (temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc.) for your postal code for the current month.
- Adjustment to account for yesterday’s automatic seasonal adjustment accuracy given yesterday’s known weather.
- Adjustment to account for tomorrow’s weather forecast.
Rain Sensors
A local rain sensor or rain / freeze sensor connected to a Rain Bird controller still works even if Automatic Seasonal Adjust is turned on. The Automatic Seasonal Adjust changes the watering duration up and down as a percent, but it does not turn off watering completely. The Rain / Freeze sensor shuts down watering if it detects enough local rain or if the temperature is too low. The Rain Bird App also needs to have the Rain Sensor switch set to active to allow the Rain Sensor to turn watering off.
Learn more about using Automatic Seasonal Adjust in this article:
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