@Franz,
I live in Hawaii, and I think my yard gets much more than the 6-8 hours of sun in the “Lots of Sun” category. As a result, the flex zones are not watering my yard frequently enough and I’ve had to mess with other settings and create falsely low custom nozzles and adjust allowed depletion just to get enough water.
Would it be possible to add another category (something like "extreme sun: 8-10hrs/day) for those of us that live in the desert?
Thanks!
@shapps47, what’s your soil type? We’re a little curious about some of the estimates there - as a result, Available Water under advanced zone settings seems to need a bit of adjustment for our Flex Schedules to run ‘properly’. I’m guessing this has more of an effect that adding a few additional hours of sunlight. With new plants, all bets are off, and you’d be better using a fixed schedule until the plants are established.
I’m curious how Rachio uses these inputs in their calculations. It’s way too early for us to really conclude anything one way or the other. We’re using Blumat Digital Moisture Sensors to start logging actual soil water availability, so that we can make better-informed adjustments to the zone settings.
In a future release we want to make watering frequency a lot easier to adjust (like we allow for watering duration).
Until then, your best option is probably MAD in incremental adjustments. By decreasing MAD, you will decrease the amount applied, but increase the frequency.
This should help understand the math behind what is taking place. Want to have full transparency.
… and this explains all of the current levers and dials.
http://support.rachio.com/article/385-flex-schedule-tips
Hope this helps, love the discussion, and let us know if you have any further questions.
@franz this brings up an interesting point on soil type. The soil here in my area of castle rock is the definition of clay. However in order to get turf grass to grow “stuff” must be added And tilled at least six inches. So does that make it more of a clay loam? It makes a large difference in AWC. There might also be some intelligence that can be added here. I.e if you select cool season grasses only allow loam types of soil?
I have also noticed that with my flex schedule things are a bit browner than they should be.
I think most of Colorado is clay loam, that is what I have. The USDA has a shared resource with the USGS to generate a Web Soil Survey (WSS) for your address which will tell us with type of soil is found in your area naturally.
Yes, definitely want to make these selections more geography based.
I think two options here, one increase watering duration on flex schedule zones (in the flex schedule there is a water adjustment), or go into your zone and adjust managed allowed depletion (MAD) slightly down to increase watering frequency.
Note, if you do go from clay (.15 inch available water capacity) to clay loam (.20 inch AWC), this will lengthen the time between waterings since your irrigation amount will be greater and it will take more time to pull it down to zero, but apply more water per application.
This explains the science behind it.
Hope this helps.
This will be in a simplification release, before next watering season. We will be doing a major release with a lot of these types of features. Not going to happen this year, but look for it Q1 next year.
