The short version
- You can tell FireShield to start on its own in a set number of days, hours or minutes.
- Choose foam or water at the same time, and the zones it should run.
- A schedule never delays a fire: if one crosses your activation distance first, automatic activation takes over and starts sooner.
- When the fire takes over, it honours your configured delay rather than spraying instantly — you still get your window.
- A schedule that has already fired, or a system that is already running, clears itself. Nothing stale can hold your system back.
Wildfire timing is not convenient. The wind forecast turns bad for Thursday afternoon. The evacuation warning arrives at 4am. You are in Sacramento for work and the fire is in your canyon.
In all three cases the useful action is the same, and it is not "watch the app". It is: have the property wet before the front arrives.
Water needs time. Wetting a roof, eaves, siding and the ground around the house is not instant — the system works through zones in turn, because no domestic supply can feed everything at once. Starting when you see flames is starting late.
Set it and go
FireShield lets you schedule a start: days, hours and minutes from now. Set it, choose whether that run uses foam, and leave.
The app confirms in words — "Starts in 2 hours" — under the dials, because a mis-set stepper is the kind of mistake you only notice when nothing happens. Reading it back in plain language makes a wrong number obvious before you walk away from your phone.
This is the feature for:
- A forecast, not a fire. Red flag warning for tomorrow afternoon, and you will be at work.
- An evacuation with a deadline. Told to leave by 6pm; you want the property soaked by 8pm when the wind is due to turn.
- Being away. Anywhere with a phone signal, days ahead.
A schedule is a floor, never a ceiling
The obvious objection: if I schedule for 8pm and a fire arrives at 6pm, have I just told my house to wait two hours?
No. This is the most important thing about how it is built.
Automatic activation continues to run underneath the schedule. Every cycle, the system compares two moments: when your schedule would start it, and when the fire would start it. The earlier one wins.
If a fire crosses your activation distance and would start the system sooner than your schedule, the fire takes over and the schedule is discarded. Your schedule can only ever make the system start earlier than it otherwise would. It can never delay it.
The detail underneath that
When a fire overrides your schedule, the system does not spray instantly. It honours the delay you configured for automatic activation — your minutes, the ones you set for exactly this moment, so you still get your window to look at the alert and decide.
There is a piece of engineering hiding in that sentence. The countdown is anchored to a timestamp, and the controller works out the remaining time as anchor plus your minutes, minus now. If the override reused an old anchor, the sum would come out negative — already expired — and the system would spray immediately, silently skipping the minutes you set. So the anchor is stamped fresh at the moment of the override, every time.
That is a one-line fix for a failure nobody would ever see in a demo and everybody would feel in a fire.
Nothing stale is left behind
Two housekeeping rules, both automatic:
- If the system is already running or draining, the schedule has served its purpose and is cleared.
- If a schedule's time has already passed, the marker is cleared rather than left sitting there.
The second matters more than it looks. A stale schedule marker left in place would keep a device out of the automatic path — the system would think it was waiting for something that already happened. Clearing it on sight means a schedule can never quietly hold your protection open.
The rule to remember: a schedule can only pull the start time forward. Nothing you set in the app can make your house wait for a fire.
What to ask
- Can I set the system to start at a future time, without being there?
- If a fire arrives before my scheduled time, what happens?
- Can I choose foam or water for a scheduled run, and which zones?
- If a schedule is missed or the system is already running, does it clean itself up?
The leading competing system publishes manual start and full remote control from its app, which covers the case where you are awake and watching. A future-dated schedule — set it and get in the car — is not something they publish.