Hi I have a couple of questions as to how to best take advantage of weather intelligence. As I understand it, it will monitor precipitation total from the closest WUnderground station and if that amount is more than the amount in your settings threshold (either 12 or 1 hour in advance), then it will skip.
Two questions about that:
I live in Seattle (a suburb actually) and we don’t frequently get “a lot” of rain. But it does rain frequently. The default threshold in the app is 0.125". That seems to be pretty high for our area…which means that most of the time, our rain will never eclipse the threshold, even though we may have several days of pretty consistent rain. It may even rain fairly steadily on the day it’s supposed to water.
It feels like the right thing to do would be to lower the threshold from 0.125 to .0625 at least - but I’m always scared to change settings when I don’t truly understand the space.
Based on the above and folks’ understanding of Seattle weather, does it make sense to you all to change downward? I’m surprised the “weather intelligence” isn’t smarter to take into account cumulative precipitation both in days leading up to watering and in calculating soil moisture %. Seems like a big miss for something deemed “intelligent”.
Yesterday I think we actually did eclipse the 0.125" threshold, but then around midnight I got an alert from the app that said something (don’t remember exactly because the alert disappeared) about weather intelligence overriding what would normally have been skipped for some reason I didn’t fully understand. Would be great to understand how this works and under what circumstances it overrides the skip.
I would try adjusting downward and see how the system behaves. We do have a skip called “Saturation skip” which does take into account previous moisture.
But…after having said all this I had the engineering team review your schedule and it’s actually a flex daily which does not “skip” like traditional schedules. It only waters when the moisture levels are depleted in zones. So adjusting your WI settings will not impact that schedule. Here is an explanation of the different schedule types.
I see - thanks. So then with my flex daily schedule it should be adjusting moisture levels based on the amount of precipitation we have received? Assuming I am understanding correctly, then I’m still somewhat confused.
It rained yesterday - really pretty hard. I find it difficult to believe that saturation levels were such that the lawn needed more moisture this morning.
I did mention that I got some sort of alert telling me something about it overriding a skip - could you please look into what happened last night? Looking at the weather underground, you should also see that we got quite a bit of rain yesterday… Thanks for such a quick response.
Your system is close to this Seattle area. It looks like there is an issue with our weather provider. That precipitation should have been recorded and show up in your zone moisture graphs. Our weather provider is usually very responsive and hopefully will have this resolved soon. Will provide more information when our weather provider reports back to us. In the short term you might want to choose a nearby PWS until this issue gets resolved.
Thanks so much Franz - I switched to a single local weather station for now and will look for an update back on this thread in the next week or so! Very much appreciate it.
Let me know if there’s any other info I can provide.
Our teams dug into the missing precip and found the same issue we spoke of last week where one of the main sources had not updated until a few days later. At this time we are going to move forward with brainstorming alternative methods in case this continues to be an issue. We did check on the 25th and confirmed the data had updated with the correct values, but a few days after.
Hi @franz - am checking in to see any updates here. Do you think I should continue trying to use single individual weather stations, or is it safe to go back to the weather network now?
@franz - can you please help? I turned on my sprinklers a week ago. They ran once and it’s been reasonably sunny in the Seattle area. Yesterday was one of the heaviest rain days we’ve had in a long time - downpours for much of the day. AND YET LAST NIGHT MY SPRINKLERS RAN FOR 107 MINUTES!
I’m really scared my lawn is going to flood badly and die - I’ve turned off flex watering for now. I can’t trust it. Can you please help me? The benefit of Rachio is supposed to be it will smartly water, but right now it seems like it’s anything but :(.
