Watering restrictions

Many places limit when you may water: a water authority, a council, a water management district, or an HOA may restrict watering to certain days, forbid it during the hottest hours, or cap how long each zone runs. LocalSky’s restriction system encodes those rules and feeds them straight into the skip engine, so the dashboard’s verdict already reflects what you are legally allowed to do.

Restrictions live under Settings, Watering restrictions. Check your local water utility or municipality for the exact rules where you live; LocalSky’s job is to honor them, not to know them.

How a restriction interacts with the engine

Restrictions are evaluated before the weather skip rules. When a restriction blocks watering right now, the engine skips and the verdict reason names the rule (for example, “Watering restriction (HOA summer): today is not an allowed watering day”), so you see the legal block rather than a weather explanation.

Multiple restrictions stack. The engine evaluates every enabled, in-window restriction and the tightest rule wins: if any one of them forbids watering, the run skips. Duration caps accumulate as the smallest cap across all active restrictions. Restrictions also stack with your ordinary skip-rule thresholds (rain, wind, freeze, soil moisture); the overall verdict is the most restrictive of everything that applies.

Address parity

Many jurisdictions split the watering schedule by house number: odd addresses on some days, even addresses on others. Set your parity once, at the top of the page: N/A, Odd, or Even. Each restriction carries a separate allowed-weekday list for odd and for even addresses, and the list matching the parity you set here is the one that binds. (It carries a third list that binds every address regardless; see allowed weekdays.)

Parity matters only for a rule that genuinely depends on it. A rule whose odd and even lists name the same days binds on its own even at N/A, because it never depended on your house number in the first place. Only two things need a parity to decide: two weekday lists that differ, and a date rotation keyed on the address. Those stand aside at N/A rather than guessing, so that half of the rule blocks nothing, while the rest of the same restriction (its every-address days, its forbidden hours, its cap) still applies. The page warns you loudly when an enabled restriction is in that state. Pick Odd or Even and save to enforce the schedule.

The restriction fields

Each restriction has an id (a short snake_case key), a display name (what shows up in the verdict reason), and an enabled toggle. Disabling keeps the entry but stops it being evaluated, which is handy for a seasonal rule you do not want to delete. Beyond those, a restriction is a stack of gates, any of which is inactive when you leave it blank, plus two fields that are not gates at all: the head types this rule spares and the zones it is limited to.

Effective window

When the restriction is active across the calendar. Options:

• All year: always in effect. Most restrictions use this.
• Summer (US DST): active from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November (the US daylight-saving window). Some US water districts switch rules with daylight saving.
• Winter (US standard): the complement of the above.
• Custom range: an arbitrary start and end (month and day), including wrap-around across the new year (for example November 15 to February 28). A day that overruns its month is clamped to the month end, so “February 30” means “end of February” rather than failing silently.

Outside the US, use Custom range for any seasonal rule; the DST and standard windows follow the US daylight-saving calendar specifically.

Allowed weekdays

The days you are allowed to water, given as three checkbox rows: one for odd addresses, one for even addresses, and one for every address. The odd and even rows are read against your address parity; the every-address row is for a rule that does not depend on your house number and is read whatever your parity is. An empty row is no gate at all (water any day).

Each row that applies is its own gate and every one of them has to pass, so a rule that fills the every-address row and a parity row allows only the days that appear on both. If today fails either, the run skips with “today is not an allowed watering day”.

Use the odd and even rows for a rotation schedule. Use the every-address row for a flat “everyone waters the same two days” rule; that is the row the Two days a week starter template writes. Identical days in the odd and even rows work too, and bind even at N/A parity, but the every-address row says what you mean and does not trip the parity warning.

Date rotation and the 31st

Some districts rotate by the calendar date rather than by the weekday. Date rotation offers four settings: None (the default, no gate), Odd addresses on odd dates, even on even, Everyone on odd dates, and Everyone on even dates. The by-address setting is the one that needs your address parity; at N/A it cannot decide and lets the date through. On a date the rotation forbids, the run skips with “today is not an allowed date for this address”.

Nobody waters on the 31st is a separate checkbox, and its whole reason is arithmetic: 31 is odd and so is the 1st that follows it, so a 31-day month would otherwise hand the odd side two watering days in a row. Districts that rotate by date usually write the exception in. The checkbox is honored on its own as well, with no rotation set, and it is checked before the rotation: on the 31st the skip reason is “the 31st is never a watering day” whatever the rotation would have said.

Days per week

An optional cap on how many days in a Sunday-to-Saturday week may have a run. LocalSky counts the distinct days that already watered this week, today excluded, and once that count reaches the cap the morning run skips with “this week’s allowance of watering days is used up”. Any watering counts toward the week, a morning run or a zone you started by hand alike, because the count comes from your run history rather than from the schedule you planned. Leave the field blank for no cap.

Forbidden hours

A no-watering window, given as a start hour and an end hour (0 to 23 / 24). The window is inclusive of the start hour and exclusive of the end: a 10 to 16 window forbids watering from 10:00 up to 16:00, and watering is allowed again at 16:00. The window may wrap past midnight (for example 22 to 6 forbids the overnight hours). Leave both blank for no time gate.

This is the right gate for “no watering during the heat of the day” rules. Inside the window the run skips with “currently inside the forbidden window”.

Max minutes per zone

An optional hard cap on how long any single zone may run per dispatch. The tightest cap across all active restrictions wins, and that cap is then combined with the zone’s own duration ceiling, so the shortest limit always applies. Unlike the other gates, a cap never causes a skip on its own; it only shortens runs that do go ahead.

Exempt sprinkler types

The heads this rule spares, picked as chips: rotor, spray, MP rotator, drip, bubbler, and other. Many districts exempt drip and other low-volume irrigation from the schedule, so check what your own rules exempt before you set this.

Putting a zone’s Sprinkler type on the exempt list removes that rule’s day and time gates for that zone. The engine then checks every other applicable restriction, safety gate, soil condition, and owner rule before the zone can run. An exempt drip bed can water while a restricted lawn waits, but a freeze or operator hold still stops it. The zone card and dispatch use the same completed verdict. Set each zone’s head type in the zone editor.

A duration cap is not exempted along with the schedule. The tightest cap across the active restrictions is worked out for the yard as a whole and applied to every zone’s planned minutes, exempt heads included.

Only these zones

The zones this rule is limited to, picked as chips. Leaving every chip off is the usual setting and binds the rule to the whole yard; naming zones is what narrows it. Only those named zones inherit that rule’s day and time gates. Every other zone is still checked against the restrictions that apply to it and the rest of the decision ladder.

Starter templates

The page has three one-click starter templates so you do not start from a blank form. Each adds a generic restriction you then edit for your area:

• No midday watering: forbids 10:00 to 16:00, all year, any day.
• Two days a week: water Wednesday and Saturday only, plus the same no-midday window.
• Odd/even address days: odd addresses water Wednesday and Saturday, even addresses Thursday and Sunday (a common parity rotation).

After adding a template, open it with Edit, adjust the days, hours, and dates to match your local rules, then save the restriction. Adding the same template again replaces it rather than duplicating it.

Saving

Adding, saving, or deleting a restriction persists that change immediately. Selecting your address parity also saves immediately. The engine picks up the saved configuration on its next tick. A failed save shows an error; check it before assuming a new restriction is in effect.

Where to read more

• Skip rules at a glance: the full veto ladder, including where restrictions sit.
• Skip rules in depth: how each input becomes a verdict.
• Irrigation engine: the scheduling and duration math a cap is applied against.