To be honest, after a couple of weeks with my Rachio I’m frustrated. I’ve been out of town for the past five days, and on four the the last five days I’ve received e-mails saying my water schedules will be skipped because of forecast rain. When I check Accuweather’s history of rain for my town, there has been absolutely no rain in the last four days. (http://www.accuweather.com/en/us/louisville-co/80027/july-weather/35020_pc?monyr=7/1/2014&view=table). Knowing this, I thought I’d run a cycle manually. I hoped to run a cycle like on my old electronic controller where I could tell it to run all circuits for the time programmed for each cycle. Instead, my only choice was go run all circuits for the same amount of time, which is ridiculous since my drip circuits run about two minutes whereas my turf circuits run 25 minutes. Or, I could sit down and spend the next three hours or more running each of the 12 circuits individually.
You must give us more control over manual watering, and you must look at historical rainfall, not forecast, in order to properly water. I am very frustrating…I’m afraid I’ve wasted $300 on this toy!
I will add to my last comment…underwatering turf isn’t a big concern; it’ll survive. But, my vegetable garden must be watered properly to avoid problems like blossom end rot on tomatoes, or herbs withering in the sun.
@bgd When we do not skip a schedule, we do create a history event that shows why we didn’t skip with the rainfall prediction. This event shows up in your history. What other data were you looking for? Thanks!
@JimAskew The next release coming soon will have the ability to one click start schedules OR manually select multiple zones with different watering durations. I believe these features will solve the issues you have noted. Let us know if there is something else you were thinking. Thanks!
Each day’s actual rainfall. Whether you water, skip, or do nothing. Predicted rainfall would be nice as well, if/when you look at it. This would help me to see if your view of my weather has any connection to reality.
If too much stuff is added you’ll need to also add a filter on data types for people to add one or more data types and then save that so each time they visit they don’t need to add they filter again.
@jeremyshultz Agreed, we do have the ability to filter on events, we were going to wait until it made sense to implement it in the mobile application. Thanks for the feedback!
@franz I’ve found noaa.gov to be the most accurate. Accuweather, Weather.com, WUND, they often get it wrong. Parsing through government text files can be a pain I’m sure, but it’ll pay off if you incorporate their data instead of data that’s been modified by a third party.
@franz - one of the other home automation products that I use (Universal Device’s ISY), just moved their weather data provider to http://www.hamweather.com . Have you explored them? This was due to cost and content as compared to their previous provider.
FYI, their use of the data is to allow their home automation product to manage compatible irrigation systems by giving the owner the ability to use weather [data] variables in determining how to control their irrigation system.
I do question the use of any of the weather sources to determine whether or not I need to irrigate in my ‘micro climate’. What I mean is, I watch radar often. The particular area we are in is in a bit of a valley. We often watch the 60-80% rain chances move around us to the north and south, delivering less rain as expected and some times none. I think the future is in soil probes and rain sensors to determine how much to water and when not to. Weather forecasting seems to be more of a crap shoot more than ever, with the impact of climate change, etc. The storms we’ve had here in the NE have been unprecedented this last week. Some areas got 4" of rain, some (me) got .73" where we were forecasted for 2"-4".
Thanks @SteinyD we are looking at hamweather as well as some other leading APIs. I agree with your assessment on micro climates. We are looking at other ways at getting weather data. Thanks for the information and feedback!
@jeremyshultz Hoping to start testing early next week and submit to Apple shortly after. As soon as testing is finished on Android we will put into the Play store. Most of the development is finished up.
I’ve had the Iro installed for about a week and am glad to hear what is being added in ver 1.5. It sounds like this problem may be addressed, but I would like to see the ability to reschedule the next run and then have the entire schedule updated. The example would be when a rain delay occurs, but then you don’t want to wait until the next day in the schedule (potentially 3-4 days). As it stand now, I have to create another manual program that runs every day to get it to run on the current day and then turn it off.
I also would suggest a feature to indicate that you want to change a specific future run by a percentage up or down similar to other irrigation controls. You could do this now by modifying the cycle definition, but a percentage change that only impacts a individual date on the schedule would be useful.
@LNorris - I don’t disagree with your premise above and having the feature ability to shift the schedule by a period of time at my discretion. However, I wouldn’t do it automatically. If I get a 2" rainfall today, I won’t irrigate for a couple of days (or more) depending on my zone conditions, future weather conditions, etc. This will be different for everyone.
I’d like to see the ability to delay based on the amount of actual rainfall and some algorithms to determine when the next appropriate ‘restart’ date would be for the schedule.
@SteinyD - Automatic based on an algo would be ideal, but I was only suggesting an option to reschedule manually; selecting anywhere from now/today to some point in the future and then the normal schedule would resume based on that run. It is very cumbersome to try to do this with the current app.
@LNorris - thanks for that clarification. That makes sense to me until we have better realtime and ‘micro’ understanding of ‘rain in my backyard’. We also need to consider how this will play into watering restrictions. For instance, when we are in a dry period, my town initiates water restrictions. They have come in the form of odd / even day watering (based on house address), watering only during certain (night time) hours, etc. So, if we need to delay based on rain activities, etc., and we then fold in water restrictions, how does this all come out in the end.
Oh, by the way, I have a maintenance service mow my lawn. They usually come on Fridays. On my prior system, I never water on Friday mornings so that the turf is relatively dry for Friday maintenance. So I usually have Friday restricted throughout the season.
