Watering duration not affecting moisture chart

I’ve noticed that if I change my watering duration for any of my zones from the default to any other duration, the moisture graph doesn’t seem to reflect that. No matter what, it shows the same amount of water added when a cycle is scheduled to run (in this case .36 inches). It seems like if a zone runs longer it should be planning to add more water which could possibly even change the frequency of watering. Let me know if I’m off base here.

I’ve noticed today even if I run a zone manually over and over, the moisture chart never reflects the change. It’s acting like it only updates for a single cycle, perhaps even the first within a day. I only noticed since I just setup my first zone and while I was adding and adjusting emitters, the number never went up despite me doing lots of manual runs.

The amount added, in your case .36 inches, is a constant. This is the irrigation amount, or depth of water, that is added when we need to fill the zone check book. This constant does not change (unless you modify soil type or crop type), throughout the year, just the watering frequency.

:cheers:

The chart should reflect even short manual watering events.

On the moisture graph look for a water drop. You can hover over the drop to see what type of watering occurred. Also, if you look at the raw data it will state the exact amount of water applied.On the chart below July 18th shows a water drop and a manual irrigation event of .05 in. If you are not seeing something similiar, please reach out to [support@rachio.com] and they can help resolve the issue.

:cheers:

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I guess I don’t understand why this would be a constant if the run time varies.

The combination of crop type (which determines your root zone depth) and soil type (determines available water capacity) equates to a fixed amount of water that needs to be applied to fill the zone check book (think debits/credits) to the top.

The run time determines how long the Iro needs to add X amount of water.

So, let’s say you have a nozzle chosen with a .7 in/hr precip rate and the run time is 10 minutes to add .5 inches of water.

If you now tell the system that the zone has a nozzle with 1.5 in/hr precip rate, the run time will be ~5 minutes to add .5 inches of water.

Things that affect the run time are zone nozzle and if you have +/- the zone water adjustment level on a flex schedule (water drop +/-).

Hope that helps.

:cheers:

@franz That’s actually where I was looking. If I ran it manually for several minutes, then went inside and refreshed / checked the raw data the number wasn’t updating. I can just contact support.

What’s odd is it was registering changes but then just stopped. Then this morning, after a scheduled run the raw data had some manual watering listed. I hadn’t done any manual watering today.

My initial thought was you guys were using UTC. Since I was playing with this in the evening, on pacific time, if you were using UTC it would swap the moisture data’s raw manual amount to the next day. Worth checking out.

We are using UTC, but the watering event should register on the day of the Iro’s timezone, which could explain the issue you are seeing. I’ll work with the development team and let you know what I find.

:cheers:

Maybe I missed a step setting the timezone? I just checked the history and it definitely only has the fixed schedule from this morning.

Timezone is derived from the Iro coordinates or zip code, so you don’t need to set that.

It could be we are just displaying those irrigation events in the wrong bucket due to UTC.

I just need to follow up with the development team to make sure we are correctly displaying according to Iro timezone.

:cheers:

I’m noticing the same thing.

A change to some flex watering parameters are not immediately seen in the soil moisture window. It’s like the changes go to the cloud, where they’re processed on some frequency, but not real time, and then the moisture chart and/or data are only updated on a set frequency (once per day, twice per day, etc.), not real time.

An easy way to see this is go change the weather station on the main screen, and change it. Then, you’ll see that weather station doesn’t change in the soil moisture window real time. It takes some amount of time (overnight?) for batch cloud processing to process received information and then update the soil moisture window data.

Best regards,

Bill

The weather data (due to weather station) we capture on the soil moisture graph is persisted once as an observation, we do not go back and re-write historical data. Any soil moisture data in the future will always use a forecast, so you will not see a weather station, but ‘Forecasted’.

I want to make sure we don’t start confusing issues.

:cheers:

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I was able to reproduce, will get a fix out this week :wink:

:cheers:

Excellent, thanks!

Looking forward to the fix. We just had rain in California (finally) and I got a rain delay due to .37 inches recorded…but the moisture graphs and raw data show as zero precipitation on both days. Forecast looks right though…