Help with Zone Setup

I just setup my Gen2 yesterday and I’m hoping to get some help with how I would configure my zones for my front grass. I have about 400sqft of grass in the front on a 9 degree slope house down to street. The front is east-facing with a decent sized shade tree on one half of the yard. This area actually has two zones that water it. Zone 2 runs 4 pop-ups across the top of the slope closest to the house spraying down. Zone 3 runs 4 pop-ups across the bottom of the slope along the sidewalk spraying up. I set each zone to 200sqft and both on a moderate slope. I’m still not sure the controller is taking into account that these two zones water the same grass. I also feel like I should be setting up some kind of stagger to prevent runoff onto the sidewalk, but I can’t find anywhere to set that up. Is this all I need to do or is there some other fine-tuning required?

First thing is make sure your slope is set to,at least moderate.

Second make sure the soil type is,set as close to your soil type.

Third, make sure that smart watering is enabled on your schedule.

Fourth, and the hardest, make sure the percipitation rate for your zone is,correct.

These are the most important factors that control soak cycles.

Oh yea,make sure in your schedule that you do not have emitter or bubbler zones combined with sprays and rotors zones.

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Thanks for your help!

I did set the slope to moderate on both zones.

I live in the western part of Denver very close to North Table Mountain, but I have no idea what kind of soil we have here. I picked “Sandy Loam” since that sounds right I suppose.

I do have Smart Watering enabled.

I haven’t the foggiest idea of what the precipitation rate is, how to measure that, nor do I even see a place to input that into the app or web UI.

The only zone with mixed emitters and spray heads is the back yard zone with a very small patch of mostly flat grass and some small shrubs. I am not looking to re-plumb all of that at the moment.

I work in IT, so I guess I am tech smart and grass stupid…

So do I (Golden), and I believe most Colorado soil is clay loam :wink:

If you pick the correct nozzle type, that will get you close for watering durations, unless you want to do some measuring (i.e. catch cups).

Just make sure that zone is not in the schedule you want smart cycling. Smart cycling is a great way to avoid runoff.

:cheers: :colorado:

Well that’s interesting, switching to clay loam vastly increased my watering time, but spread the days between watering quite a bit. This is one nice thing about buying a product designed right here in Colorado, you couldn’t ask for better expertise on the area. Will it take into consideration the soak time for this soil type and cycle the heads on and off to prevent runoff?

By the way, it would be a nice feature to see in future versions to have the watering schedule adjusted if you modify the zone configuration. I only stumbled onto the need to do that by checking to see what the changes did to my watering schedule and finding no change until I deleted it and created a new one.

The chart in this article shows the maximum your zones will run before soaking based on nozzle, slope, and soil.

http://support.rachio.com/article/283-smart-cycle-overview

I agree. Our flex schedules (coming back with our 2.6 software release very soon) do work this way.

Ah, ok, so the fixed spray nozzles on moderate slope clay loam will only run for 8 min per hour until there is a total of 22 min runtime for that watering day? It might also be nice to show some indication of that in the app (or at least the web UI since there is more screen real estate there).

I think that is an excellent question, because it will make a big difference on the number of cycles. On the original HydroPoint WeatherTrak (no longer in the residential market ), they had a step in the setup mode on slope. If you selected slope, the screen would prompt you to dial top of slope, middle of slope or bottom of slope. This might be too much for most homeowners. What do others think?