I have a Rain Dial 6 that came with the 20 year old house I just bought. According to the manual I downloaded, there is supposed to be a semi-auto function, though I cannot seem to make it work. I see on the display that the first zone is on, but the sprinklers are not on. When using the normal programming function, the sprinklers come on properly. Is this enough information to troubleshoot why the semi-automatic function is not working? Possibly related is that any time I turn on a station manually, if the sprinklers are scheduled to come on later in the day, they will not until the next scheduled start day. Is there some kind of function that prevents the sprinkler program to run if they were manually turned on within a 24 hour period?

After manual watering, do you set your function to off, before going back to auto, and then check/ or reset your auto watering settings? Also make sure your current time function is correct when you reset the start and end times, and shut off the manual function.