Manual schedules

Most of the time you want LocalSky’s smart engine to decide when and how long to water: it reads the weather, runs the soil-water-balance math, and fires a zone the moment its deficit justifies it. 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 smart math still computes and still shows up in nerd-mode and on the zone-math tiles, so you can see what the engine would have done, but it does not dispatch. The manual schedule is the only thing that fires.

Use Override when you want full manual control of a zone: the clock you set is exactly what runs, no more, no less (restrictions aside, see below).

Floor

In Floor mode the manual schedule is a minimum, not a replacement. The manual run fires on schedule, and the smart engine is still free to add more runs for that zone if its deficit math 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. The trade-off is that Floor can overwater if your scheduled run already satisfies the deficit, because the engine does not subtract the manual run from its own sizing. Reach for Override unless you specifically want the engine to keep adding water.

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.

Restrictions still apply

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

The page edits a working copy. Add or edit a schedule with the form, then click Save all changes at the bottom to persist. Saving round-trips through the config API. The dispatcher reads the schedule list at startup, so a newly added or edited schedule takes effect on the next container restart rather than mid-run. Restrictions and the smart engine pick up changes on their own next tick, but the manual-schedule clock is read once at boot.

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.