Why cycle?

Water cycling essentially breaks your total daily watering into increments, which gives the soil time to soak up water. By watering with breaks in between, the ground can absorb water from the previous round of watering.  In subsequent rounds of watering, the moistened soil allows water to travel even deeper, creating a healthier lawn.

As well, if you water too long in one increment, the ground reaches a saturation point and excess water can run off and is wasted.  This can be particularly problematic with “harder” or more compact soils.

How do I set up cycles in Spruce?

Cycles are available in every schedule type in the Spruce App.  The maximum number of cycles is 4.

One cycle is one watering interval – so if the Cycles setting is set to 1, Spruce will run the zone for the set amount of time without any breaks.

The time that you set in Basic and Manual schedules is the total time.  To determine watering time per cycle, divide the total time by number of cycles.

How is time between cycles determined?

Most schedules are set to water multiple zones.  When multiple zones are scheduled to run, Spruce will leverage the time in which the other zones are running as the “break” time between cycles.  Spruce will try to optimize each schedule to maximize the number of time between cycles.

If only one zone is set to run in the schedule, Spruce will wait for 5 minutes between each cycle.

To visualize schedule cycling in the app, click on a schedule tile in the Schedules section of the app, and select a day where watering occurred, and reference the chart that shows the watering timeline for that schedule.