I am a user of Rachio in Europe. Everything works fine here, but I have some special case to be resolved. Could you please check if there are no pitfalls in it and scheme looks like working?
I have a well in my yard with rather small throughput, 800 liters/hour (around 200 gallons/hour), shared for house needs and for watering. In order to water reliably and do not have issues with water in house during watering yard, I have 5m3 (around 1300 gallons) water tank that I’m filling, temporary manually, and then I’m using other pump for watering yard from this tank.
Since electricity costs at night (11pm-7am) half a price comparing to day time, and also using water in house at night is limited so it’s better to take water that time, I would like to fill a tank by schedule at night.
I have unused 24vac valve so I installed it to the tank’s incoming pipe.
Now, I’m going to connect it to one of zones of my Rachio and set fixed schedule like 11pm-7am.
I want to pass zone wire through relay controller, that uses level sensors that were put to tank, and connects inputs when level is low/disconnects when level is high. It means, Rachio will think it waters zone for 8 hours long, but relay controller will really disconnect power from valve in few hours, depending on how much water system will need to make tank full.
Does such configuration promising to be working and if there any drawbacks?
I understand calculations of water usage will be doubled, but this is not something I care about. What else can be an issue?
Are you using a float switch that breaks the common for the zone relay? That seems like an great little method for topping off the tank. As long as it takes <8 hours to fill the tank each day it would seem like you’re in good shape.
…I used for some time simple float switch that just closes pipe (without electric connection) but it worked unreliably for me, I checked another one and was no difference for me - there were some cases that they do not fully close. I don’t know why, on internet people say it’s cheap and reliable, but because of the flooding in my case I don’t trust them, now I bought controller that works with condense sensors, opening and closing some pair of contacts, like relay (how it works: sensors are just 3 rods with different length, 1 for ground and 2 for lower and upper level, when they are covered by water, electricity between them passes and controller knows tank is filled. Having 2 levels is just to remove bouncing, when water reaches high level, controller’s relay disconnects pair of contacts and it will not connect them until water will go beyond low level and so on)
@sanyok - If your Rachio unit is configured to turn on the tank pump when it is watering the yard, then it will turn on the tank pump when you’re filling it up also. Right now there is not a way to turn off the master valve/pump option per zone. You might need to get a separate wall timer that turns on the AC to a separate 24 VAC transformer during the right times. I would get one that can keep the time over any power outages as a straight mechanical timer probably will get out of sync with the real world time and start using more expensive electricity.
I don’t control tank pump by Rachio, my tank pump is automatic/turns on by changed pressure/when one of the zone valves is open, so looks like I’m fine here.
