Flex daily schedule is set to run at 4 AM twice per week due to watering restrictions. At 4 AM on a run-day, soil moisture for a zone is calculated to be above allowed depletion, thus skipping the watering. However, it turns out the high temperature that day ends up being 100°. By evening, the soil moisture is now 0. If the flex daily schedule allowed the system to run (and complete prior to midnight), the moisture balance could be recovered with an evening run without having to wait days before the next allowed watering day.
This is a major issue in CA this week. We skipped this morning’s watering due to moisture levels, but by this evening the lawn was bone dry. Yes, a manual water fixes this, but I have to remember to trigger it in time to finish before technically breaking the law.
This would be extremely useful for our setup.
Thanks for considering it! Loving our Gen 2 otherwise.
I’m having this issue too due to very sandy soil and shallow roots. Since Iro is supposed to be a smart controller, it should be smart enough to figure out that watering is required in the middle of the day, not just the next day, under extreme weather conditions.
I’d recommend doing something sensible, such as falling back to the current behavior. Or finding a weather station that isn’t broken. The latter would be an improvement to a currently manual process; the former would result in the same behavior anyway.
I have been thinking alot about this problem. My problem is slightly different that yours But I think the solution might be the same for both. Mine is where the crop ET for the day ends up being more than the irrigation amount scheduled to be put down that day. I know that some folks have either manually added water later in the day, or set up a “temporary” fixed schedule to take care of the problem. For one zone (of just flowers), I tried making the root depth a little deeper to get it to water longer just for those ET>watering days.
I would really like to see if there could be a more automated process as well – I travel, often to places where I only have access to wifi once a day, if that. So I REALLY need automation. And right now, when I add the second watering myself, I’ve just been topping it off a bit (drip zone had run in the morning for 67 minutes, I add 20 minutes late in the afternoon) – I’ve been doing some reading, can’t find the exact answer, but my gut is saying that I really should run the whole 67 minutes again to make sure the water gets down deep enough.
And Rachio is going to have the issue of how often the weather station is sending data, as @plainsane said. In my case, I see changes to my moisture level data throughout the day, and the system deciding that it needed to water after all, so it is obviously checking more than once a day.
It would really be nice if we could choose by schedule whether to let it check and run again in the same day. In my particular case I would not want/need the lawn to function that way, but I sure as heck would love to have my drip zones work that way!!! And I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who would want it for their lawns.
And yes, I love my Rachio, and I love even more that the Rachio team monitors our forums and values our feedback.
