So I logged on to my Rachio this morning and I’m scared to death of what my water bill is going to be. My lawn is bluegrass (specifically Blue Wave sold by the Grass Pad in Kansas City). I have 7 zones, 6 of which are my lawn. 5 of those 6 are full sun zones as they get at least 8 hours of sun a day… The other zone is my flower beds in the front.
Typically it waters 5 or 6 of the zones and does so for a total of 651 minutes! Now it was only doing this about once a week. However this morning it is showing it’s going to water 5 times in the next 8 days! I feel as though this thing needs some tweaking. Please help.
Can you show a screen shot of your moisture graph for the next week by clicking on the ‘>’ next to June 7. So far it’s showing that you’ve watered twice in the past 7 days, so I’m curious to see what’s going on in the next 7 days that will cause it to water 5 times
So from your screenshots, nothing looks too crazy as far as what the controller is doing. Your ET starts to get high into the upper .2’s (0.28 on June 11th), which means your frequency will increase leading to less days between watering.
How do you feel about that 0.8 crop coefficient you have? I don’t know your grass type that well, but the default cool season grass coefficient is 0.7. You have it set higher means the system thinks water is being used up more quickly, so it’ll want to water more often.
My grass is a Bluegrass blend designed for the area I live in.
As for the crop coefficient value, I really don’t know how it or I arrived at .8. That’s a very good question. That isn’t something that Rachio adjusts based on the month is it?
It is not. The coefficient in flex daily stays the same, along with all your other settings… unless you change something of course. The thing that causes water changes in flex daily is the weather (temperature, rain, etc). If your lawn is looking good, think about dialing back that coefficient to the default cool season grass of 0.7. If you want to visually see how it will impact your schedule, do it on one zone and then compare that next 7-14 day watering schedule to see what it was at 0.8. You should see at least one less day I would think.
Yeah my lawn looks absolutely fantastic. It’s a deep, lush green. Of course we’re just now hitting 80s and skirting into the low 90s so it’s not like it’s had to work all that hard.
Dialing it back delayed watering by a day. I wish there was a way to look up the Kc for a given region.
who knows, maybe it’s out there… most important thing is just keep an eye on things, if your goal is to save as much water as possible with keeping a healthy, green lawn, then just dial it back slowly
Yeah I have searched and searched. The only data I can readily find is for CA and NM. Other than that it’s hard to find. But I will work on dialing that back. I think cool season grasses can go back to as much as .6.
good catch, my zones are pre-existing before the change so that’s why i don’t see that when i change my grass type. Like the post says, do the 10% adjustment to see if you’re results are any better.