The weather has been very hot here in NorCal for the last couple of weeks and my controller keeps throwing climate skips which makes no sense to me.
For example, the ground was already pretty dry yesterday and then we hit upper 90s and the plants were thirsty. It is forecast for lower to mid 90s today. So it decided to do a climate skip last night. Huhh!?
It was doing a poor job of automatic watering (even after reading all about the advanced settings and dialing everything in as best I could) and our new plants were wilting, so we went to an every other day manual schedule but left the controller to do rain skips and such.
So far I am not at all impressed with the controller’s “intelligence” and unless I can get this thing working as smart as it is advertised to be, I am thinking of just going dumb with it and regretting the extra money I spent.
@bradlymathews Without reviewing your schedule and weather station it is hard to determine why it is climate skipping so much. If it is easier, I would disable climate skip (Edit schedule --> Weather Intelligence --> Climate skip). You will still get the benefits of automated rain delays and automatic shifts in watering frequency each month. If you’d like a deeper review, support@rachio.com should be able to help out. Another option is to switch to flexible daily schedules (fully dynamic scheduling). Those do take a bit more effort to setup and are far less predictable than other schedule types.
Thanks, I turned that off, further tweaked my AD and moved to a monthly watering schedule (I was on daily before going manual for a while there.)
When I got this controller I really thought it would be less work to get it dialed in properly. It is very easy to get set up and working which gives one a false sense of accomplishment because it is not necessarily easy to get it set up and working correctly.
I have one suggestion - better education on the mobile app while setting up zones would be very helpful. Tell the users what their choices actually mean and the ramifications as they make their selections. That will get them a lot closer. Then at the end tell them they might not be done and have direct links to further reading/videos to teach them how to dial it in over time.
Agreed. We understand education is a part of the app that we could do better at. There are some concepts and defaults (crop based on location, soil type based on location, etc.) that we can help the user much more with.
Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated, and please let us know if you have any other questions or feedback.
