Thank you.

Does this sound like a good watering schedule? Any tips, suggestions, changes to make?

Thank you again

Your watering schedule needs to be adjusted, but the type of grass you have is going to determine the type of adjustment to be made.

As for pre and post herbicides, worry about that later. Get your grass and watering issues under control first. Tell us the type of grass you have, then we move foward from there. If you could post some pictures, that would be very helpful.

Thank you.

I could easily be wrong, but the way I read the original post, it didn't sound like the OP was applying 30 minutes of water all at once every three days.

Folks who set their timers and walk away just need to be better educated on watering turfgrass correctly. It's not that they don't want to, they just don't know any different.

I assume Phoenix is a different animal when it comes to watering needs. I'll just keep suffering in the hot, humid South.

Will post pictures when I get home. I guess there may have been confusion, I had a lot of questions, one of which was about my watering schedule. Originally I was just hitting all zones sequentially, 5 minutes a pop (which is where I started experiencing runoff with the clay soil) once, in the morning, and again at dusk. I read on here that you are supposed to soak the grass infrequently all at once. So I thought that I'd do bursts of 5 minutes, and let it soak in for 25 minutes, then repeat 3 more times. That would give me 30 minutes of watering without the runoff over the course of 2 hours. I'd do this to each zone every third day.

That was the watering question. The bigger problem is that I've pretty much nuked my yard and it looks like a zebra now. I haven't gotten down and looked at the root area of the dead grass to see if there are any new shoots sprouting out, but it sure looks like it got burned bad. I don't know if I need to resod or just try to coax this back to life again. Wouldn't the application of more nitrogen only worsen my problem?

I still would like to know exactly what product you used; you said it was Scotts Miracle Gro with turf guard. I really don't know that particular Scotts product. Could you be more specific, and include an analysis (3 numbers on the bag).

I believe this was the culprit.
Scotts� Turf Builder� With PLUS 2� Weed Control

It's been about a month and I threw the bag away when I finished with it. This is it I'm pretty sure.

Do you have Bermuda? If so, it will fill in the dead spots once it can. It may take a while since those are some big dead spots, but Bermuda is a hardy grass and it spreads pretty aggressively.

You can probably speed things up by taking sprigs from healthy areas and planting them at intervals in the bare spots.

I know the pain of trying to water deeply with clay soil, and I think you're doing the right thing. When I bought my house, I could only water for 15 minutes per zone before it started to run off. So I watered for 10 minutes each zone, then ran through it three times, for a total of 30 minutes (similar to your approach). By doing that, I got the soil moist and ready to take water, and each cycle got the water deeper. As time went on, the soil was able to take more water without running off. I now water for 20-30 minutes per zone and repeat three times.