Prior to Rachio controller there was a lot of guesswork involved when unusual storm events happen during irrigation season. And also having to go to the garage and figure out the dumb controller to rain delay.
Note below on 5/14 that though my citrus trees hit 0% moisture balance, Rachio didn’t irrigate since the forecast had plenty of rain coming as confirmed & logged on 5/15. Glad Rachio didn’t water because watering before a big storm would be bad for the trees and wasteful. Across all zones, we’re saving water without thinking about it thanks to mother nature and Rachio!
TLDR, Northern California is having quite a storm track right now and Rachio has removed the guess work for stopping and resuming irrigation. Irrigation, provided the current forecast holds, is scheduled to resume around 5/26.
I am loving the intelligence of my Rachio right now. I’m in Central California (Fresno) and we had some rain on Wednesday and Thursday (almost an inch near my home). Our current watering days (per the City of Fresno restrictions) are Wednesday and Sunday. My trees and shrubs water before sunrise, and my lawn after sunset. Because of the forecasted precipitation, nothing watered, and my yard got a good soaking Wednesday night into Thursday. We are scheduled for another storm today, which is pausing any watering for tomorrow too.
I’m just sad walking around my neighborhood seeing all the yards with water runoff because they didn’t adjust their controllers, and tried to water saturated soil.
Soil moisture in South Carolina. We moved here from New Hampshire last September. Since the climate, soil and types of grass are different here I decided to go for the Rachio 3 even though we had a brand new rainbird controller from the builder based on reviews and hoping for a savings on water. Since we have a brick house and I wanted it inside the garage I had drill a 1 inch hole through the garage wall to accommodate the PVC pipe for the wires. I also added Google wifi boosters and put one in the garage to assure a good signal. All that being said when i opt for weather intelligence plus the controller won’t water for days on end and the soil moisture drops down under 50% and everything looks weathered on my property so I went back to a manual water schedule, which is something I didn’t want to do, rather take advantage of the Rachio water saving design. So today I went back to the weather intelligence plus and it tells me no watering for the next week at least when there is no rain in the forecast with lots of sun and temperatures nearing 100 degrees in the foreseeable future. I’ve tried the 300,000 weather stations as well as various weather stations within a mile of our house with no change in the watering schedule. Currently the app tells me I watered for 41 hours and Rachio says I should have only watered for 21 hours. So I wasted about 20 of watering? Everything looks awesome outside! I’m absolutely certain all my settings are spot on , ie; soil type, grass type, beds, sun exposure and so on. At this point the only advantage to having this controller is the fact that I can control it with my phone, which I like but the flex daily water savings is, at this point, useless. Love the controller being added to our smart house, but not to smart so far. Wish I didn’t mention it to my neighbors.
Peter
@Gizmo878 so what is the current state of your Rachio? Flex Daily with a selected PWS (which one e.g. it’s ID) or WI+? Fixed with rain skip turned on (advanced zone settings are only used for saturation skip onFixed iirc)? Have you looked at the moisture graph and chart as you switch stations or adjust advanced zone settings? It is always recommended to use a local weather station if there is one but sometimes there are undetected duds. We can try to help but need some specifics.
The state of the controller is, flex daily with a registered and active WS 2 miles away. The soil moisture is 110% right now with next watering time the day after tomorrow. Guess I’ll let it run and keep a close eye on it. Just don’t wanna play catch up with the heat being in the mid to upper 90s for the foreseeable future. Thanks for chiming in on my post.
Peter
So I deleted my fixed schedule and used weather intelligence plus. It skipped yesterday and ran today for a short time today. It’s been 95-104 the last two days and it was gonna skip tomorrow. Since it still tells my soil moisture is 110%, which can’t be ive decided to stay with my fixed schedule. So i have a controller that works from my phone. I don’t believe the weather intelligence plus is accurate.
That’s a perfectly valid and great use of a the Rachio controller. But let us know in a new thread/post if you ever wish to explore why you feel Flex is not working as informed by your experience. It may be poor weather data for your area or advanced zone settings need a tweak. It took me many weeks to trust Flex with my advanced zone settings. It’s certainly reasonable to be wary of a new to you, but scientifically valid, way of watering.
