I have a pressure regulator installed upstream of my flow valve so my system sees constant pressure. I installed this to reduce turbulence since my city service pressure is 115 psi. I have followed the Rachio installation guidelines on distances of straight pipe, but I continue to get high and low flow alerts which is making me curious about how flow alerts work. I have set each of my zones to only alert ±20% of the calibration value. I still get high/low flow alerts outside of this every day on most of my zones. This puzzles me though, because since I have no leaks and a pressure regulator my flow should be very constant. Can someone explain to me how flow alerts work? I am trying to understand if they are instantaneous gpm alerts or smoothed averages gpm values to reduce erroneous values from noise,
For example, if the zone turns on with an alert window of 15-20 gpm and sees the following flows for 1 second each 17,16,17,16,17,16,21,17,16,16,17. In my example the mean would be 16.9, but one outlier reading was outside the flow settings (I see values like this during calibration). Would that example trigger the flow alert in the app? Or does it watch an average of multiple readings over some time period to trigger an alert? This would be a basic smoothing function in data analysis. If Rachio doesn’t use smoothing in the design I think that would be a beneficial addition, because even after changing my settings I get alerts on almost all zones every day. I would have to set the sensitivity bars so wide to prevent alerts (50% or 150% of flow) that it defeats the purpose of having this meter in the first place.
Thanks for the info! I am curious to get into the details of this meter.
