Could you explain the behaviour of this schedule?

Hi all,

I got a zone with a flexible daily schedule that includes some simple annuals in shady areas of my garden. See the below image for last week’s behaviour:


If you will look at Oct 20th, you will see that at the end of the day all water have been depleted - 0.00 moisture balance. You can also see there is no rain all through the week, and weather has been warm (somewhere in the 80s).
On Oct 21 I was expecting the schedule to run. However, I woke up to find it was skipped “Flex schedule shaded processing skipped due to rain delay”. I had to manually water the area (used the remote).
This is a repeating behavior and I can’t understand what is going on. Any clues?

Thanks,
Yaron

Could you temporarily try using a different weather station and see if that changes anything? You have me stumped. This looks odd – you might try giving support a call.

Well, tried two weather stations, tried erasing the schedule and recreating it… Nothing helps. I’m fighting this for the last month. Finding myself manually watering the garden half of the week.
I have emailed support. They asked me to turn off all weather related logic. Perhaps it will work (I’m testing it), but if I can’t use it, than why use Rachio? It will be no different than any other timer…

By the way, the one of the other “nice” surprises I have is a message for another schedule, a daily fixed schedule, that state that it was not skipped due to no rain, but in practice it won’t water. See the image below for the full message.

I was just going to ask if you have any other scheduled that are not flex daily – I’ve been using flex daily (or whatever it was called before) for over 2 years now, and have never seen a rain delay unless I manually set it myself. What time is your daily fixed schedule set to run? Is it close to your Fixed daily schedule time? I have a vague recollection of reading something in the forums where some screwy stuff can happen if they are set for the same time.

They are an hour apart - 4am and 5am. I tried to move the schedule to 3pm. It behaved the same.

Can you try disabling “Climate Skip” on the Fixed schedule? Doing some searching in the forums, that might fix it. It would be worth a try.

I knew I remembered reading about this – Here’s a thread where @franz talks about it being a known issue that they are working on.

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Linn,

Climate skip was on a flex schedule.
I’ll try to spread the schedules across a few hours. This is a huge bug in the algorithm… Thanks for sending the link.

Will update.

Wanted to update on the situation.

After working with Rachio’s support on this, we figured out that schedules were planned too close to each other (eg. one schedule set for 5:00am and a second to 5:05am. Some where for the same time).
As Linn shared, this is a known (now to me too) bug with the v2. I have grouped same type of schedules together, and made sure the are scheduled separate - one for 4:00am and the other for 5:30am.
Today the schedules worked as expected. I hope it will resume.

Everyone should be aware to this flaw in the algorithms used by Rachio. One of the nice things about smart controllers is that they should be smart… In this case we got a dumb controller. I really hope that this will be fixed (together with other annoying behavior and UI) in V3, although according to current bets it seems we still have time till V3 will be upon us…

Thanks for the support!

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