How far ahead does flex daily look at the forecast?

Our New England fortune tellers (aka weather forecasters) are saying we may be in for 2-3" of rain this coming Sunday. I see my little friend here wants to water some parts of the lawn Friday morning starting at 5AM. By the time it wants to water will it be able to take Sunday’s forecast into account? The moisture graph only shows a forecast through May 11th, but is the schedule looking much further ahead behind the scenes?

I’m sort of curious if I should toss it into standby given the potential for a lot of precipitation coming, let Sunday do whatever it ends up doing, then come out of standby and let the system catch up if need be.

Thanks in advance.

Rachio’s Knowledgebase http://support.rachio.com/article/382-flex-schedule-faq says, "Every night at midnight the schedule will update the forecasted weather data with observed weather data and applies a checkbook style accounting of the moisture level for each zone. "

Lucky you–we are are coming up on the hottest and driest month of the year.

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Unless I’m missing it the KB is missing the answer. How far out (24H? 48? 10 days ?) does it actually look ahead is what I’m after. I’m low on coffee this morning so it could be right in front of my face.

So from experience, I think that a run Friday morning will NOT take into account Sunday forecasted rain. It will only look at that day (Friday). So on Friday, the system will take Thursday moisture level, add predicted precipitation for Friday only, and if the Thursday level + Friday precip forecast keeps your above your bottom Allowed Depletion line, then the system will be pushed out to Saturday…and then it repeats.

So if I were you, and you don’t mind letting your yard hang out for a couple days, I would place it into a rain delay for 2 -3 days to see how Sunday pans out.

FYI, if you go to your moisture graph, you can see how the system will predict out the next 2 weels. Just look up towards the top of the screen by the date and you can click the right arrow to go to next 7 days. I’d screenshot but I can’t at work.

I completely missed those arrows, thanks for pointing them out. Now that I see the data it makes me scratch my head and agree that your prediction is probably accurate.

You can see it plans to spit out ~0.36" of irrigation Friday morning to bring the zone up to 100% from (not shown in image) 19% on the 11th even though another 4.6" of water is forecasted over the weekend.

That… seems…

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Yeah if that were my lawn, I would be putting that thing into a 3 day delay. I like putting into a delay vs putting the schedule into standby because then you don’t have to go back in and take it off standby.

I think in situations like this (where the zone will be at or below the refill threshold), the Rachio errs on the side of the lawn and waters… just in case the forecasted precipitation doesn’t come through. I think even if you had rain scheduled for Friday, it would still water. Not 100% on that, but I think I’ve seen people post that situation up before.

Looks like you start Friday with a +.07 balance, with a -.07 withdrawal. So you’d end Friday at 0 if it didn’t water.

Doesn’t sound like your particular forecast is likely to bust, but they regularly bust where I live, at least during the summer.

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There’s always a chance. I wish I could be wrong 70% of the time like our weather people and still keep my job. :laughing:

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People would literally die if I were wrong even half of that amount in my job

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I think my controller heard me and trolled me. I received a “how to do rain delay” email from Rachio a couple hours ago. LOL

I’m going to put a 72 hour rain delay on. I see no value in putting extra time on my well pump for no reason.

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another thing I do after a good rain is watch my graph to see when it’s going to want to water again. Many times, I may push it out an additional day or so because the ground is really more saturated than the system thinks

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Ditto

We did not end up getting as much rain as expected as the major rain lines broke further north of us, but still enough that I’m glad I did the rain delay for a few days. I think I’ll be in a much better starting place for Rachio to “fill up” the zones tomorrow.

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