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Manual schedules

Most of the time you want LocalSky’s smart engine to decide when and how long to water: it reads the weather, settles each zone’s weekly water balance, and fires the zone on the mornings its session spacing allows. Manual schedules are the escape hatch for the cases where you want a zone on a clock instead, a fixed weekday and time you set yourself. You might use one for a drip line on a flower bed the engine does not model well, for a city that mandates a fixed watering window, or just because you prefer a predictable morning run.

Manual schedules live under Settings, Manual schedules. Each schedule fires one zone, on the weekdays you pick, at the start time you set, for a duration you set. Smart irrigation keeps running for every zone that does not have a schedule; manual and smart coexist zone by zone.

How a manual run interacts with the engine

This is the part worth getting right, because it is the whole point of the feature. Every schedule has a mode, and the mode decides what the smart engine does for that zone on the days the schedule fires.

Override (the default)

In Override mode the manual schedule replaces the smart engine for that zone, for that day. When an enabled Override schedule applies to a zone today, the engine zeroes its own planned run for that zone so it does not water on top of your manual run. The engine’s own figures for the zone (throughput, crop coefficient, heat multiplier, capture efficiency) still compute and still show on the zone’s detail panel, but its planned run for that day is zero and the panel reads “Scheduled 0 min”. LocalSky does not show what the smart run would have been. On those days the zone card and the zone detail read ON HOLD and name the schedule. The manual schedule is the only thing that fires.

Use Override when you want full manual control of a zone on the days the schedule covers: on those days the clock you set is exactly what runs, no more, no less (restrictions aside, see below). On the days it does not cover, the zone is a normal smart zone again, and the engine sizes it from the weekly water balance with the schedule’s own water already counted against that week’s target. Cover every weekday, or delete the schedule, if you want the zone to water only on your clock.

Floor

In Floor mode the manual schedule is a minimum, not a replacement. The manual run fires on schedule, and the smart engine may add more runs for that zone if the weekly water balance says the lawn needs more water than the scheduled run delivered. Think of it as “at least this much, plus whatever the engine adds on top.”

Floor is for minimum-coverage patterns: a guaranteed baseline run with the engine topping up during a heat wave.

Two things decide whether the engine ever gets to add on top, and both can close the door completely:

  • A Floor run is watering like any other, so its water counts against the zone’s weekly target. A schedule that already delivers the week’s target leaves the engine nothing to add.
  • A Floor run also resets the session-spacing clock. The engine paces a zone at floor(7 / sessions_per_week) days between sessions, and it measures that from the last run of any kind, including yours. So a schedule that fires as often as the zone’s own session cadence leaves the engine no eligible day at all: a weekly Floor schedule on a 1-session-a-week bed (the default for any zone whose name contains shrub, garden or bed) never opens the gate, and neither does a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule on a 2-session-a-week zone. The zone reads ON HOLD, naming the spacing, every day.

If you want a zone fully engine-driven, delete the schedule rather than switching it to Floor. Switch to Floor when you want the scheduled run to stay as a guaranteed minimum and you have raised sessions_per_week enough to leave the engine a day to work with.

The two modes differ only in what they do to smart dispatch. The manual run itself fires identically either way.

Per-zone behavior

A schedule targets exactly one zone (its Zone field), and the mode applies to that zone alone. Override on the back yard does not suppress smart on the front yard. You can mix freely: an Override schedule on one zone, a Floor schedule on another, and pure smart on the rest. You can also have more than one schedule on the same zone (for example a morning and an evening run); each fires on its own clock, and if any of them is an enabled Override for today, smart dispatch for that zone is suppressed for the day.

Days, times, and duration

  • Weekdays. Pick the days the schedule runs. An empty list means it never fires (effectively disabled). Days are independent: a schedule set to Wednesday and Saturday fires on both, with the same time and duration.
  • Start time. A start hour (0 to 23, 24-hour local time) and a start minute (0 to 59). 5 and 0 means 05:00. The dispatcher ticks once a minute, so resolution is one minute and the run fires when the clock reaches the exact hour and minute you set.
  • Duration. How many whole minutes the zone runs per fire, at least 1. This is the planned length; a watering restriction can shorten it (see below), but nothing lengthens it.
  • Enabled. Disable a schedule to keep the entry but stop it being evaluated, the same pattern as restrictions and zones. Handy for a seasonal schedule you do not want to delete.

A schedule fires at most once per day per schedule. If two ticks land on the same minute (clock skew, a leap second), the dispatcher remembers it already fired today and does not double-run.

Holds, safety, and restrictions

Rain delay, vacation pause, hold-all, and active Skip overrides stop manual schedules. Enabled weather safety checks also apply by default.

The Ignore weather safety option is a separate, persistent waiver. Arming it requires confirming the physical consequences, including watering during a freeze or high wind and without live weather evidence. The saved schedule wears an Ignores weather badge, and each dispatch records which gate was bypassed. The waiver never clears an operator hold or a watering restriction.

Manual schedules are not a way around your watering restrictions. Before a manual run dispatches, the engine evaluates the same restriction policy it uses for smart runs. If a restriction blocks watering right now (wrong weekday for your address parity, inside a forbidden-hours window, out of season), the manual dispatch is skipped and a skip row is logged to the runs table with the rule’s reason, exactly like a smart skip. A duration cap from a restriction also applies: if a rule caps zones at 60 minutes and your schedule asks for 90, the run is shortened to 60. The tightest cap across all active restrictions wins.

So a manual schedule sets your intent; restrictions still set the legal floor and ceiling on top of it.

Saving and when it takes effect

Adding, saving, or deleting a schedule persists that change through the config API immediately. The scheduler reads the current saved schedule list on each tick, including the first schedule added to a running install. Schedule edits do not require a restart. A save failure is shown on the page; check it before assuming the schedule changed.

Where to read more

  • Watering restrictions: the rules that gate a manual run before it dispatches, and the caps that shorten it.
  • Irrigation engine: the smart pipeline an Override schedule suppresses and a Floor schedule sits on top of.
  • History and reporting: where a manual run (or its skip row) shows up after it fires, attributed to the schedule.