I live in Denver, home of Rachio.
Weather Intelligence Plus claims to be accurate to a 10 meter radius.
Well, it is not.
I grew up in the northeast and if it was raining in your yard, it was raining in the entire town.
But, here, in Colorado, you might get rain and your neighbor might not. Weather Intelligence Plus is not working with the extreme micro-climates that we have here. All this week, it said we had rain and that we will for the next 5 days. But, it did not rain at my house today.
Some serious work needs to be done with the forecasting of this part of the software.
I live north of Denver and am having the same issue. My soil moisture is currently at 0% and does not show a watering cycle for 3 more days. My grass is definitely not getting enough water right now.
I have an external hunter rain sensor and was wondering if it would help it know that there was no rain or if it just stops it from watering if there is rain.
The external rain sensor only stops the system from watering if you get enough rain to activate the sensor. It does not use it as a measurement of precipitation.
For both you and @davebarnes your best bet is to find a local PWS that seems to have good data. When I first got my Rachio 3 I tried Weather Intelligence Plus and wasn’t happy with it. I quickly converted back to using a PWS near me. MUCH better results for me.
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I am not sure if this is just a local issue to a region like Denver. I live in MA and with the forecast showing rain all week, my irrigation has actually been watering at least 2 days out of 4. I sent a ticket to rachio to understand what is happening since the schedule I am using has been working flawlessly for weeks.
I messed with the Weather Intelligence feature and when I went to it and manually reelected it, my schedule would update to include a rain skip. That is the only way I avoided it watering grass for a 3rd day this week. Something seems to be not working correctly with that feature. Could it be due to app release updates we had recently?
@Linn
Can you explain how you decided on WHAT local PWS to use? I have many in my area, just not sure which one to use…
What do you look for specifically?
Thanks
I looked for one that was close to my house. Nothing scientific at all, but I looked at the stats it was producing for the last few months (to make sure it was staying up) and looked to see if the precipitation seemed reasonably close to what I was seeing,
Thanks. These stats are found in the Rachio app when accessing the weather station? Or do I need to get WU app and check stats?
When you click on “More Info” in the Rachio App, it will take you to the WU pages.
I am new to the Rachio. We have a gen 2. I have spent several hours trying to figure out how the weather intelligence works. We live in central Indiana. When I started I used an MID weather station. Data was not coming over. Switched to a PWS. Working much better. We have 3 PWS stations within 4 miles. Each has a different reading. I find that setting and forgetting does not work. I spend a few minutes each day checking the stats. We have a Rainbird rain sensor I am using. It blocks the cycles when the moisture reaches the set point. Has saved several waterings. I understand the gen 3 uses weather data from many locations as it’s weather intelligence and is more accurate at monitoring the water cycles.
I have my own PWS but it doesn’t always help. Rachio will often skip watering based on the forecast for the area, not your micro climate. I’ve asked several times for the option that it would skip watering only based on actual rainfall, not forecast, but never got a satisfactory response. And obviously they’ve not implemented the suggestion
The single most important piece to Rachio is its ability to accurately know how much rainfall occurred in the users location. Only way to truly know the real amount is to have a rain guage onsite. I have the same problem in South Carolina and I am using a PWS that is .63 miles away. Rachio needs to develop a wireless rain guage that communicates with the controller. This would fix the major weakness of the Rachio system.
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Can I cancel a Rain-forecasted-skip if the showers pass me by, or do I have to wait and run the schedule manually?
On the dashboard if the schedule is set to be “skipped” you can “unskip” it essentially cancelling the skip and telling the system you want the schedule to run no matter what happens with the weather.
