Negative Impact of Manually Watering on a Flex Scheduled Zone

True, but that would require me to constantly do that manually… Kinda negates buying a smart irrigation controller, don’t you think…

I agree with @bhochenedel, water balance shouldn’t be able to go above 100%, as anything more would logically not be absorbed anyway…

Each zone has a saturation allowance, which is usually 10%-20% above the irrigation amount needed to fill it to capacity. We won’t allow it to go over that :wink:

:cheers:

uhhhm…

im recommending it as a solution to get the estimated moisture in sync with your yard as you had mechanical failure. im not so dense i would recommend you open the valve box each time you want to water manually.

@dowjames Hmm, I’ll have the development team take a look. My guess is we are visually displaying wrong but we will discover the root cause.

:cheers:

@franz It looks like that is tied to the allowed depletion level. Check out the screenshots, I can change that number just by changing that zone setting. I really don’t get how these numbers should add up if you use the checkbook analogy. Despite my various deposits, it doesn’t really add up at the bottom line.

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Found the issue, you should be at 127%, not 227%. This fix will go out tomorrow afternoon.

:cheers:

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I am so glad I found this thread. I had been thinking about to add this as a feature request.

I would like a grab-able slider for my moisture balance. If it says its 120% and I want to drop it to depleted…so be it; if its 127% and I want to drop it to 100% (so It waters in a day or so ((assuming no rain))) so be it.

Second alternative would be a radio button on the manual watering page to water “incognito”

And please default the manual watering zone selection to “no zone, please select” or “zone 1” I hate when I forget to change the “all zones” default.

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Just a heads-up, we are incorporating a ‘Fill’ button, and ‘Reset’ button on the moisture graph that will fill or deplete your zone moisture level :wink:

This should help with a lot of the stated use cases.

Rolling out next week or so.

:cheers:

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Yes! Thanks!

Web and mobile app?

Yes, web first, and once in mobile will have identical functionality.

:cheers:

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Another possible case for allowing “incognito” manual waterings:

My backyard is not large and has three zones. The borders of the zones overlap (head-to-head spacing) so the three zones are linked. I figure when they run at the same time, those overlap sections get a deeper watering, right? If they ran on separate days, the water doesn’t soak in as deep. So it makes sense to put them on the same schedule so they water together, right? (I’m asking a lot ’ cause I don’t know much about irrigation and could easily be wrong!)

My neighbor’s cat likes to wander into my yard occasionally and I like to scare him out of the yard by manually running one zone for one minute (or less). It’s usually the same zone. Since each of those one-minute waterings “count,” eventually the three back yard zones have gotten out of sync and the cat zone is scheduled to be watered on a different day. A similarly thing happened in my front yard when I was working on one zone and not the other.

In addition to not running on the same day and not getting the deep soak benefit, it seems like those short little waterings shouldn’t matter much, if they are just one minute per day, say. That can’t be worth as much as one extra minute on a scheduled day, where more water is added at the same time and the water can soak deeper. Or maybe that’s part of the evapotranspiration calculation already?

Anyway, is it important to keep all of my back yard on the same schedule? Or do the overlaps not really matter much? Would this be a good case for not counting manual waterings in some circumstances?

Does a manual watering event apply cycle soak to a zone?

I’m in a similar depleted situation after a kind neighbor (mean that sincerely) called the fire department to shut off our irrigation system while we were on vacation - we had a broken line on a backyard drip. For a week, Iro dutifully “watered” multiple zones with nothing but air, and applied that phantom water toward our flex moisture balances. We missed several major watering events that I’m now trying to catch up in the 100 degree Texas heat. My biggest concern is for a tree zone that gets deep watering at about week and a half intervals. I want to schedule a manual watering for that zone, but I’m traveling. The run time is about 158 minutes, and unless cycle soak is applied, the Texas clay soil will just run that catch-up water into the street. Obviously I can trigger the manual watering from anywhere there’s an internet connection, but I have no way of knowing if the zone will run continuously, or cycle soak.

no.

holy shnickeys i want a flow valve incorporated into this iro. totally could have kept the authorities out of this situation.

Unfortunate. If I’d known I could have just turned off the leaker zone rather than have the whole system shut down. On the bright side, I am blessed with good neighbors.

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fully on board, but with a flow valve, it could have alerted you to the broken zone the day it broke. they record the flow rate for each zone, if the flow rate is outside the margin of error, the flow valve can shut down not allowing any water to flow and alert an email address of the error. and yes, you have great neighbors, the ONLY point i was trying to make is that there is technology for this failure scenario which would have allowed you to disable/fix the zone before going out of town. i for one welcome our robotic overlords…one day, one day…

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@dowjames (and others) – just to close the loop on this:

First off, here’s a great video on soil types and why it’s important understand what type of soil your lawn has. At the end of the video is a link to a tool you can use to find out what type of soil is native to your area.

What’s the difference between field capacity and saturation?

If all soil pores are filled with water, the soil is said to be saturated. Plants need air and water in the soil. At saturation, no air is present and the plant will suffer. Many crops cannot withstand saturated soil conditions for a period of more than 2-5 days. The period of saturation of the topsoil usually does not last long. After the rain or the irrigation has stopped, part of the water present in the larger pores will move downward. This process is called drainage or percolation.

As water drains from the pores, it is replaced by air. In coarse textured (sandy) soils, drainage is completed within a period of a few hours. In fine textured (clayey) soils, drainage may take some (2-3) days.

It is easy to determine if a soil is saturated by taking a handful of saturated soil is squeezed, some (muddy) water will run between the fingers.

Hope this helps :smile:

Best, Emil

@briansusername, you might benefit from doing a catch cup test to measure how much water is being applied to your zones. Here’s a great white paper written on the best practices of how to conduct a catch cup test by the Center for Irrigation Technology.

Just curious, is this occurring multiple times a day? I wouldn’t think that a quick manual run once a week will throw off your Flex schedule much, but happy to review your account for you if you’d like. Just email our support team [support@rachio.com] and reference this post.

I have a few ideas on ways to fix this for short durations, but it will take some testing before we can make any major system changes. Pending the test results, I’ll post an update here in a few weeks.