New user, new home, schedule/configuration questions

Hey there, I just sold a home where I had many rotors and a weathermatic controller & weatherstation that calculated evapotranspiration by the way of hi/low temp for the day, humidity etc

This worked well and along with the rain sensor @ .25" I was pleased with it controlling the scheduling.

Fast forward to now, I sold that home and moved into a new place where i’ve installed a Rachio gen1 on a smaller .35 acre plot that has 9 zones of spray & rotors… 6-8 sprays per zone or 3 rotors per zone depending.

I have property configured each zone, using the default of 1.5"/hr for the sprays and 1"/hr for the rotors (aren’t rotors closer to .5"/hr?)

The plot has excellent head to head coverage, however I have not adjusted the efficiency settings past it’s 80% default.

My first automated run is set for the 22nd “as needed” and it looks like it’s chosen 10 minutes for the spray areas and 14 for the rotor areas.

Are there any other configurations or things I should do to optimize my setup and hopefully use less water as well, i’m in the same utility jurisdiction as the last house and our city water is very expensive.

EDIT: also it rained about .2" since midnight today and i don’t see that reflected anywhere in the scheduling.

its hard to pigeon hole them. do you mean rotaries that throw the big drops?

i think that is safe. you can play with higher values, if you KNOW you are getting equal coverage over the entire area…there is a formula you can look up to compute its value.

make sure the smart features are turned on, you will NEED that soak with the sprayers.

that is all you can do for now.unless you want to get really involved with configuring your permanent wilt point for each zone (available water). you can push that down to delay waterings, but at this point, you are playing with fire and will not gain tooooo much out of it but could put beeer money back in your wallet by the end of the season.

im sure other ppl have some suggestions. but you are on the schedule type that caused flex to become a pariah so you are golden as best i can tell.

god speed!

Hey there, @ls3c6 - welcome to the Rachio community! It sounds like you’re as keen on water savings as we are, so … you’ll do fine here. :sunglasses:

Grabbing the defaults in zones and setting up an “as needed” schedule should get you a long way in using less water. To answer your question, though - there are a number of adjustments you can make to configure your Gen1 for optimal waterings. (@plainsane summarizes these pretty well)

I’ll offer you a little reading material that should help, in the form of Rachio Support Articles:

Also, I recommend keeping an eye on your Weather Station just to make sure it’s reporting accurate info for your microclimate.

Let us know if you have any further questions or feedback.

Happy watering!
~Lucas :rachio:

thanks, i read through those… also I might add when i’m troubleshooting zones or replacing heads, it would be nice to have a separate menu with buttons numbered 1-16 to turn zones on / off on demand.

Going through the manual button, selecting a zone from the drop down, thumbing in x amount of minutes, hitting start now etc to confirm a fix is kind of tedious.

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