Hi all,
I have Smart Soak enabled and using Flex Daily… My Grass seems to soak as it should. My fruit trees however don’t show any soak in the history. This morning it ran for 2.0 hours straight.
Thoughts?
Thanks in advance
Rick
If the tree zones have drip nozzle type, they’re exempt from cycle and soak since, by design, drip usually does not have runoff issues due to very low water output rates. This saves overall irrigation cycle + soak time in limited 24 hr earth days. If you do have runoff, I believe it’s possible to change the nozzle type to other than drip (like rotor) and re-enter the drip nozzle inches/hour under advanced zone settings (you may want to write that value down before changing the nozzle type)… though I’m not entirely sure thatll work. There are other calculations involved.
See last post by Franz on cycle and soak at this post:
Smart cycle and manual cycle soak are selectable for drip irrigation but they do not work. It’s been recognized as a defect in the programming, but they are working to fix it at some point in the future (hopefully).
Most people assume drip irrigation is low water output and that’s generally true for most home/consumer use. However there are a variety of drip irrigation output types and some of them are high water output types too, especially in the commercial agricultural business. The advantage is preventing wasteful evaporation on the foliage or humid environments for fungal growth. In this instance, soak cycles would be useful and even more so if you’re irrigating on a slope.
Like the helpful advice above, you can switch the nozzle type to something other than drip so that the soak cycles work.
I’ll warn you that in general, Rachio’s handling of drip irrigation with daily flex is a bit of an unpredictable mystery to me. I’ve had good success using my drip irrigation with monthly flex so far this growing season (I’ve already harvested my early season fruits). The daily flex in general requires accurate input in the advance zone settings, with the problem with translating drip irrigation water output into nozzle inches per hour.
The daily flex has been great with my non-drip (turf) irrigation.
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Thanks everyone for the feedback, I’ll look more into this shortly
Update: Looks like the settings is bubbler, so apparently that doesn’t work either
Rick
I actually kinda like the way this is done — the majority of drip/bubble systems seem not to need cycle and soak, so it’s an easier way for the user to set it up. But it’s nice that really the only thing with the nozzle portion of figuring out the duration time is the nozzle inches per hour – so changing the spray head to something that is set up for cycle and soak and then setting the correct nozzle inches per hour is perfect for those with a more unique setup. It lets the masses go “quick and dirty” if they want, but still allows for tweaking in to a more accurate setup.
Shortly after I got my first Rachio, I was frustrated with the drip calculations (there are some old, pretty long threads on this) – Each of my drip zones has 75-125 emitters on them, and it’s a PITA to try and count them. I ended up taking readings on my water meter after running each zone for 10 minutes, estimating my number of drip heads, and I was able to dial the inches per hour into something that works pretty well. The last two seasons, flex daily has done pretty darn well with my drip zones. (There is still a little bit of fine tuning I’d like to see – when the soil gets super saturated it sometimes waters sooner than it needs to, and in the late summer when precipitation is expected EVERY afternoon and we rarely get it and then things get too dry. But these are both edge cases and are probably only an issue in certain parts of the country.). Overall, I’m happy with flex daily and drip.
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Has this bug been fixed yet? I think I am experiencing the same problem. And I sure have wasted a lot of time messing with this.
Nope. Not fixed yet.
New Rachio user here. Finding lots of good information. Was not aware that the Smart Cycle does not apply to drip emitters.
My Rachio is causing a lot of over-run for flower beds, despite soak and cycle time being changed from smart cycle to manual.
Work around will require me to change emitter to sprinkler head, it seems.
Kind of disappointed in basic bugs like this that new users simply aren’t aware of, unless they do hours of research like I am doing to find this out.
Hope this gets fixed.