The once a week watering restriction is pretty wide spread in Austin and surrounding areas. Here is my unofficial watering recommendation if your morals allow for this. You can survive once a week if you water in three stages. In most areas you are supposed to water in the morning or evening but not both which is what my watering tip calls for. This is easier to implement on lawns of 10,000 square feet or less.
At midnight when it becomes your watering day run cycle number one at about 50% of what you would normally run in the heat of summer (10-12 minutes lawn pop ups, 22 minutes lawn rotors, 4-6 minutes beds are good run times) Add up the run times for all the zones and pad this number by 30 minutes. Add this run time to the midnight start time and this is your second start time. If your padded number is 3.5 hours then your second start time is 3:30 AM. You want the second run time to finish by 7 AM and even 6 if your landscape is small enough to allow for this.
The third stage needs to finish by midnight so you stay in your watering day. Take your run time and subtract it from midnight. You don’t need to pad this number. If your padded number was 3.5 hours then you just need three hours which puts you at 9 PM for the start time. If you have a medium size or smaller yard you might be able to water at 10-11 PM which is better and allows for the temperatures and wind to calm down more.
The amount of time my recommendations call for are what many people are watering already in one cycle in an attempt to flood their lawn once a week and keep it going. I’m not recommending wasting water but merely trying to give people ways to water more intelligently. The evening watering cycle really makes a huge difference in allowing your lawn to go six more days without water.