New Rachio user, Gen 1, specific Cycle & Soak question

Getting Started
1

Hi folks.

New user, techie, and my first sprinkler system. Rachio Gen 1, two zones.

My question is: Can I soak between Zones, or do I have to do all zones first, before a soak cycle?

Details:

I have a home in the Denver foothills (elevation: about 8,000 ft.). Built in '66, I am slowly making it a smart home.

The challenge is this: It’s very dry here, so it makes sense to have a lawn sprinkler system. However, water costs are high, so using municipal water up here in the foothills is cost prohibitive as cost per 1000 gallons goes up dramatically on greater use. (…like HUNDREDS a month if you water the lawn. A mistake people make only once.)

The Good: I have a very old well that I was able to fire up with a new pump and get it to produce. I have also added a storage tank.
The Bad: The well is only 38 ft deep, and it needs to rest and take time to refill.

I upgraded to a Rachio from a lesser unit so that I could have more than one daily cycle.

Right now, I have a schedule set up as:

Fixed
Everyday
Zone 1, Zone2
Start after sunset
Duration - 2 hours
Cycle & Soak - Cycle: 5m, soak 20m

So this means that my overall cycle and soak period would be for 5 hours, starting at sunset.

It would be
Zone1
Zone2
Soak (rest)
Zone1
Zone2
Soak (rest)
etc.

Going back to my question… As you can see, the two zones run before the system soaks. Can I have the Rachio programmed to Cycle Soak (rest) between the two zones?

Why I want this: This way, my watering by zone could be longer, as the system would rest after every zone running.

So… Thanks for reading this! I am open to suggestions. Feel free to respond with what you think will help.

2

If your zones use roughly the same amount of water per unit of time, you could achieve your rest goal for the well by shortening the cycle time to 2.5 min. Then your system would have run a total of 5 min after running both zones before hitting a 20 min soak. You may need to tweak the soak duration too if that number was determined by how long it takes for your well to recover the water used over the previous run cycle.

1 Like
3

The manual cycle and soak will split each zone in half and run the first half cycle and repeat running the rest of the cycle. A 10 min soak timer has run out time running the rest of the zones.