Last night (12/21) my Rachio 3 triggered our Flex Monthly scheduled watering almost everything. This morning I woke up to rain. I checked a few forecasts and all seem to show an accumulation of over the 0.125” threshold set in Weather Intelligence Plus. I confirmed both Rain and saturation skips are on for this schedule… is there anything else I should check?
Lucky for me, it was simple to pick my own weather station since it’s been reporting to the Weather Underground for years. It seems to be working just fine. Looking in history, none of my grass has been watered since 11/25. So almost a month now. It has been raining a lot. My weather station looking at it reports just over 1/2" today. Looking on the Calendar shows zero watering days right now.
So first thing I would do is check out the weather station you picked out. How far away is it? Maybe it’s not raining there? Maybe that weather station has no rain monitoring, some don’t, they’re just basic Outside temp things. So I would check that station you picked out and make sure it’s actually reporting!!!
Just checked and I have “Weather Network” selected. Is it better to select a specific station? Looks like there are quite a few within 1/2 mile of our house but I’d be concerned about relying on a single one in case it went down.
If you have a reliable PWS (personal weather station) near you that seems to mirror what you see at your house, this is always the best option. WI+ is a great technology for those in areas with little to no PWS’s nearby.
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I’m having the same problem. There are some other threads talking about the same thing. I’m not going to start changing everything till we get back to spring and summer. As for now I just have everything on Skip and just turn it off myself. one thing I read and I and I will try in the spring and summer is daily flex instead of monthly flex.
Oh interesting. So there’s a few, is there a way to tell which is/are the best to use?
Hmm ok. I’ll monitor it now that I’m using a PWS versus WI+ But good to know
I was using a fixed schedule because I pretty much can guess how much my water my times should be. Then the rains came and all the problems started. Rink coming in the forecast it cycled. The ground is totally saturated and it still cycled. So from reading the threads and needs some time to get to know what’s your plants need. and that does take some time to get right because it’s based on the weather station but we have to use daily. And is way complicated not as easy as they make it seem. You have to enter stuff like root Depth, type of soil, transpiration rates and other info. so to make it easy now stay on your current schedule and when you see rain or when your ground is really muddy like mine is just tell it to skip until you tell to turn it back on. There’s no way to work it out during the rainy season because it takes time to get used to your flex schedule and you’ll just waste water… So we will start this back in spring…
Same thing here. We’ve been having a lot of rain in our area. Rained all day yesterday and my rachio watered today with more rain scheduled for the next 2 days and showing it’s going to water again on Saturday. My sisters system I just installed 2 weeks ago is showing no watering on the same days. She’s 5mi away and showing the same rain days.
@dave11 and @proedgebiker, don’t take this wrong, but I went back and looked at all your old posts, and neither of you have really attempted to post anything for troubleshooting your systems, in fact, I don’t really even know what schedule type you guys are running to even start troubleshooting with you. There is something a miss in your setup the PWS’s that you are pointing to, or something…but it isn’t quite right.
Is Rachio 1000% perfect? No, but arguably the best smart controller on the market right now. It is only as good as the information you feed it. Rachio needs to know soil type, root depth, crop coefficient, etc. in order to correctly figure out what that soil moisture is. @dave11, I think I saw somewhere buried in a post that you are using fixed schedules, which really does only look at active or very short term forecasts to decide if it should water or skip. If you want to have the benefits of a completely fluid tracking, you need to move to Flex Daily, and there are a number of us that are happy to help get your system set up correctly.
Yes I agree. But the average person can’t figure that out. It’s way too difficult. This is not how it was supposed to be. As of now, there can’t be the solution because of all the rain we’re getting and is not enough time to set up the coefficients correctly. as I’ve been reading, and that you said in your post it takes time for your system to learn what your watery needs are. Again living southern California every time we use water we get charged for the water and get a sewer charge as well. when the ground is totally saturated, and there’s rain the forecast it shouldn’t run it all. like the rest of us, we’re probably not going to touch it till spring and summer when we need to water. right now it’s just turned off and not wasting water or costing me any money.
its nice to assume tho… LOL!
My systems both run Flex Daily with identical soil settings for FL st augustine grass. So im wondering why my system is watering when the other I installed on my sisters is not. we litelly had rain all day and my system came on as scheduled. this never used to happen.
@proedgebiker, first off, post a screenshot of your moisture graph and corresponding “more detail”. Lets take a look at what Rachio is seeing.
But, unless you are in the sticks of Florida, I’m betting you have some solid PWS’s near you. It would be a good idea to switch to one of those. WI+ is a great system, but a local, trustworthy PWS will always be a better option.
Also, I’d like to see what your settings are. Soil type, root depth, nozzle type, etc…
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If you have a nearby weather station, select that instead of using WI+. WI+ is only as good as the data it gets and there are circumstances where it is not using good data or there is a lack of data. Select an available weather station that shows the precipitation you’re getting. Ideally it’d be a weather.gov NWS station but many times rain develops in small pockets, so a less reliable personal station closer to you may be better than an NWS station.
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Why not? The stuff that you need to enter isn’t really scientific…it’s pretty basic information, you just have to be somewhat knowledgeable about your system. Crop Coefficient and some of those settings are pretty good with the default settings (these will adjust with crop type, trees, shrubs, etc), so really what you need to know if crop type, root depth, nozzle inches per hour (precipitation rate or PR), soil type, exposure, and slope. If you can get those dialed in to your yard, you will be doing pretty darn good, and some very minimal tweaks can be made from there. Those settings seem pretty simple to figure out, don’t they? If you can, post a screenshot of your zone settings (both basic and advanced) and lets see what you are working with!
The system doesn’t “learn” anything past what settings you make in the beginning or tweaks you make along the road. It is a fluid and ever changing system in that it will adjust watering according to some pretty amazing algorithms that Rachio set up.
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I run FLEX DAILY, not MONTHLY.
Live in a dense populated county in the tampa bay area, wish i was in the sticks. LOL!.
Adding my moisture info of my system and my sister’s which are set up with identical soils 5mi away from each other. she is showing a much higher moisture level and her system hasn’t ran since 12/7 due to all the rain we’ve been having. I was running the default weather network just as my sisters. I just went in now and added a single station which is .67mi away from me. i would have though that the default was better cause it uses a vast network of sats and my home’s location.
@proedgebiker Can you select one of those zones, and pull up the moisture graph and post a screenshot? Also one of the “more detail” please. Seeing that will give more insight to what Rachio is seeing and would help explain why it is doing what it is doing. Initially, it looks like Rachio is working in some respect, as you have zones at less than 10% and aren’t expected to run for another 5 days…
Again the WI+ is great if there isn’t a good local PWS, because it basically takes an average and extrapolates the data. Rachio doesn’t do this within its own software, but relies on a third party to feed them this data. I imagine Tampa is like Arizona, and we can have huge swings in weather within 5 miles.
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i will a little later, heading out now. I also just posted this up on the Flex Daily schedule. Rachio is not going to run again because i manually skipped this saturdays watering
Thank you for your comments
My Flex daily held off on watering because of forecast rain. On Thursday morning my Racchio showed 8 of my zones at 0%, the 9th (I have 9) at 6%. Rain was forecast here in Texas for Friday night. Looking at my Rachio calendar for January no watering events are scheduled at all due to rain events in the forecast. I use a PWS via Wunderground.
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