I’ve been diving into the advanced settings by created custom nozzles based on Catch Up test data and information on root depth for St. Augustine grass (“4-6 inches”) amongst others.
I’ve now started to review the Moisture Level readings and have noticed the Moisture Balance never exceeds 0.14 and the graph is constantly swinging from full (108%) to empty (0%) a few hours later. In addition, the system never seems to demonstrate any water savings as well.
Some screenshots of my dashboard are below. Any experience something similar? Can anyone help?
your available water is insanely low, is that an accurate number, i mean, that getting pretty close to concrete.
with such a low number i would expect this behavior.
edit:
5 inches of root zone * .05 of awc = .25 inches of water, you allowed depletion is 50% so
.25 * .50 = .125 inches, round up to nearesth 100th and that is why you are getting an irrigation event of .13 inches of water.
another edit:
to me, things look correct, if, the precipitation event that occurred on the 26th, occurred at midnight of the 26th.
if it is truly sand with no organic matter in it, i guess that is where you need to leave it, i cant answer that question…but you can use the geo soil db at http://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/WebSoilSurvey.aspx to help you determine if you happen to have sand or sandy loam.
i cant answer that question, you can either private message me your street address or you can use that soil database link i posted to get a more accurate value of your available capacity.
i went to the soil database mentioned above. typed in the street address, selected an AOI on the google maps (its a odd looking button on that toolbar).
from there i select characteristics tab
on the left i selected the available water attribute.
i then took 0.12 * .2 = .024 and added that to 0.05 and got 0.074 as avialable water. if the turf is getting hot, post back we will see where else we can take it…there are a lot of different knobs with flex.
@ejones1577 just one other note- we cap soil saturation right around 110%, as your soil can only saturate so much. This is why you are capping out even though you continue to get more and more precip. Another note, flex unfortunately does not show any “gallons saved” because it technically never “skips”, it just “shifts” your waterings. This has been a topic of discussion in the past, the difficulty is identifying what the baseline is for flex watering in order to use that for calculating savings.
The whole reason to use automatic (flex daily) is to use the minimum amount of water needed for the plants in the face of constantly changing weather conditions, without any any interaction with the controller.
The fact that when in automatic mode (flex daily) no water savings is calculated. I admit it’s a difficult to accomplish subject. I think it has major (positive) marketing opportunities if/when implemented.
New user here, quick question regarding the AWC. Based on that soil analysis you showed, it says centimeters of water per centimeter of soil depth. Rachio is asking for the AWC in inches.
Wouldn’t we have to take that .12, and convert it to inches (.047), which would be how many inches are in a centimeter, then multiply that number by 2.5 (how many cm are in an inch) to get how many inches of water are in an inch of soil? Which would come out to a setting of .1175 not rounded that you would input into rachio. If you strait up convert the .12 cm to inches, you are getting .047. if you are to input this strait into the system, you are dictating half of your realistic AWC by not taking into account that that .047 inches of water is only in a cm of soil?
I have been trying to determine this on my own, and would like to know some other people’s thoughts.
i will agree with you, and that is what i did for my yard at first. the issue i found is that my awc was came out to .332 and my yard burned up. rachio wanted to wait almost 3 weeks. i personally assumed that the centimeters per centimeter was an indication of scale, aka a 1 to 1 ratio, where if i saw 2.45 millimeters per centimeter i would know that it is really .245.
i might be wrong but an awc of .33 is just too high but i could still be wrong.
