Everything being done here is to accomplish per-station watering time.
If you want, you can set every station to use the same time, of course.
This thread is simply to discuss options of reducing the storage requirement of the watering time. In order to accomplish this successfully, we need to assess the needs of the users.
The reasoning behind this is simple: right now we have a single value per program representing the watering time for all stations but to add per-station watering we need to have a value for each station. If people have 400 stations (exaggerated to make a point) for example, then one program alone will exhaust the EEPROM capacity.
The end result of all of this will be: added feature of per-station watering inside programs. The tradeoff of reducing from 2 bytes to 1 byte for watering time is the granularity (or the maximum watering time if you stay with seconds).
Right now, the current maximum is 18 hours (@iDoug, it doesn’t even do a full day as it is right now). The proposed change limits the maximum to 7 hours and changes the granularity to the highest unit used.
Hope this makes sense!