What changed in flex scheduling?

Oh and to the main topic at hand, I dropped my crop coefficient on my warm season bermuda to 0.6 and I got this

That’s the only 2 days off in a row period I have in the next two weeks, but hey I’ll take it. Must be the winter like sub-100 conditions we in phoenix are experiencing today

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Four of my five zones watered today after I adjusted them to full yesterday. My ET rates seem to deplete to the allowed depletion every day. Has the definition of depletion changed from the past?

I went ahead and increased my allowed depletion to see if that will sort out my issues.

I don’t think so. What was your Allowed Depletion set to before you changed it. Default is 50

I had reduced it from 50% to 25%. To get the watering to space out a bit, I upped it to 50% this morning. I also adjusted all zones to full after the increase.

There is something wrong with the Rachio programming right now. My monthly water usage year over year has almost doubled. It seems that there are more people having the same issues I am seeing with extreme over-watering.

I had set up and meticulously configured Flex schedules May of 2016, catch cups, tested soil type, slope, accurate sun exposures, measured square footage of zones, root depths, everything… The watering was working great, the lawn looked good but not over-watered, the watering frequency was at times less frequent than I thought it should be, but the results seemed to be good. Last year I saved approximately 25% on my overall water usage from the previous year due to Rachio working as advertised. Then something changed between the time I shut down for the winter and started up this spring.

This year 2017, I am seeing many, many problems. With no changes to my setup, I am seeing a substantial increase in watering. I have put in a support ticket with Rachio, however, all the suggestions have failed to change the watering frequency/total watering.

May '16 Water usage: 15,000 gals - ave temp 62 - total precip 1.20 inches : Water Bill $109.00
May '17 Water usage: 35,748 gals - ave temp 63 - total precip 0.59 inches : Water Bill $220.00

June '16 Water usage: 41,041 gals - ave temp 78 - total precip 0.20 inches : Water Bill $225.00
June '17 Water usage: 70,088 gals - ave temp 76 - total precip 0.25 inches : can’t wait to see it…

So far in June, with 2 days left in the month, my water usage is already almost double June of last year, same experience the previous month. I use IFTTT to log my watering in a google spreadsheet; when comparing June 2016 to 2017;

June 2016 46 total hours of watering.
June 2017 113 total hours of watering.

Support had me try a new weather station, this changed nothing.
Two weeks ago I tried adjusting crop coefficients slightly to see if this changed anything.

This week I decided to delete everything and set up from scratch. I deleted all schedules and re-ran the Setup Zones process. After accomplishing this, I went into the zones and noted that all the settings that I have customized, were still unchanged in the zones even though I had re-run the zone setup. I would think this would have reset everything to defaults but it did not. In spite of this, I reset my flex daily schedules and it appears I still have extremely high water times and frequency so it appears that this hasn’t helped anything. I again, today, I deleted Flex daily completely and am going to try flex monthly. We will see if it helps.

I am ready to throw in the towel on this one, Rachio this year has already cost me $100 more for May and now for June my bill is $220 more than last year. DOUBLE my bill each month so far this year, and I am not even in July yet… when my water bill is usually the highest. At this rate of increase, I will have a $1,000 water bill for July (assuming I left Rachio to do the watering).

I see a lot of people on here talking about Rachio seeming to overwater this year vs last year. There is obviously something wrong with Flex daily, this needs to be addressed.

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Based on my observations of Flex Daily, the one variable I wonder about is ET. As I mentioned in Arizona Turf Water Consumption, the ET computed by Rachio seems a little higher than what AZMET indicates.

That said, it isn’t crazy high for me at least, and certainly not double. Aside from ET, most of the calculations Rachio does aren’t too difficult, and you can sanity check them by hand via your advanced settings:

Watering Duration

  1. Calculate availableWater * allowedDepletion * rootDepth. Example: 0.2 * 40% * 6.00" = 0.48". This is how many inches are needed to fill your root zone starting at the brown line on your Moisture Graph. You should see this value appearing periodically in your “Forecasted” Flex Moisture Level details.
  2. Divide by your precipitation rate to determine how long an ideal system would water. Example: 0.48" / 1.65"/hr = 0.29 hr.
  3. Multiply by 1 / (0.4 + 0.6 * efficiency) to figure out how long your system must water. This is about how long Rachio will water normally. Example: 0.29hr * (1 / (0.4 + 0.6 * 49%)) = 0.29 * 1.44 = .42 hr = 25 minutes. (I sometimes get a slightly different answer than Rachio but it’s pretty close.)

Frequency

  1. Temporarily set your crop coefficient to 100% and read off a daily ET value in the Moisture Graph details. This should be close to the so-called “reference ET” for your area. For Phoenix this is in AZMET summary - maybe there’s a similar site for your area.
  2. Multiply the reference ET by your real crop coefficient e.g. 70% - this is how many inches Rachio “wants” to water for the day due to weather.
  3. Once you’ve accumulated (due to weather) the number of inches from Watering Duration step #1 less any precipitation or manual waterings, Rachio will water. You can see this in your Moisture Level details.

Hope this helps you cross check what Rachio is doing. There are lots of variables so it’s hard to say what changed for you YOY without digging into details, but if you didn’t change settings then ET may be the wildcard.

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ldslaron, Thanks for the suggestions.

In my support ticket with Rachio, I pointed out two issues;

  1. I suggested that my ET rate seemed high: my moisture level graph was going from 90 - 100% all the way to 10-15% in one day. It used to be a curve to zero over several days followed by a rapid fill to 100% which is what i would expect.
  2. I also noted that frequently, my water moisture level was not dropping all the way to my allowed depletion line before refilling.

I was using their defaults of 50% depletion, 80% efficiency, .70 crop coefficient, root depth of 6 inches, available water of 0.20, with no watering restrictions.

Using your suggested method to examine my ET rates;

Crop Coefficient set to 1.0, my daily ET value in the Moisture graph details shows a 7 day average of 0.34 in.
Reference ET for my area ( http://data.weatherreach.com/udwr ) the past 7 day average of 0.27 in.

Difference is 0.07 in. which is 26% higher than it should be. This is exactly what I have suggested to Rachio, that my ET rate is too high and how can I adjust it.

My Calculation;
Multiply my researched reference ET (based on local data) of 0.27 in. by the configured coefficient of 0.70 = 0.19 inches per day that needs to be replenished.

Rachio’s Calculation;
Multiply the Rachio ET of 0.34 in. by the configured coefficient of 0.70 = 0.24 inches per day. Rachio is scheduling to replenish 0.26 inches per day which matches the calculation.

Am I looking at this wrong?

I think my initial results with the original FLEX programming that I started out with in 2016 were good, however Rachio changed this to FLEX daily sometime near the end of last year, and since then my results have not been good. I believe that they also changed the default cool season grass coefficient from 0.6 to 0.7 which would account for some of the increase I have seen, but not all.

I am going to set up the daily FLEX again, and adjust my coefficient down to 55 or 60% from 70% for my lawn and adjust my other zones accordingly as well and see if this helps. I think Rachio’s ET rate is calculated/set too high, I shouldn’t need to adjust this coefficient down so much from the default if it was accurate.

I see an awful lot of people on this forum talking about the same experience this year vs. last. Last year I saw a lot of people complaining about their lawns not getting enough water and I am curious if Rachio adjusted their ET values or the variables that affect ET rates to compensate for this. That is all I can imagine that would have caused so many to see such a notable increase in watering this year vs. last.

Interesting that you are 20-30% above the listed ET for your area - seems consistent with what I observed in the Phoenix reports. I speculated that Rachio uses a different ET calculation, possibly using daily rather than hourly values - but it’s hard to say without actually having the math. I’m looking forward to hearing from @Support on the differences.

I’d say you can definitely compensate for any sort of absolute error (as long as it is consistent) by reducing crop coefficient. As @Modawg2k concluded, if he used the crop coefficient recommended by AZMET with Rachio’s calculated ET, he’d be watering way more than he wants. Reducing the crop coefficient will just proportionally reduce the ET value Rachio calculated, and you should be able to monitor things from there.

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I think ultimately we are doing this to make our yards look good, but save money. To pull something from my professional world, when you start a new medication, you start low and go slow to taper to appropriate results. So you can look at it this way with the watering, start at the recommend coefficient (which would mean a high ET), and slowly taper to where you are decreasing frequency yet maintaining the healthy looking yard you want.

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Wow, root depth of only three inches? This is a clear sign of overwatering. This fall aerate your yard to get oxygen into the rootzone. I have a mix of fescue and Texas bluegrass and my root depth 6 to 8 inches.

DiGregorio. Thanks for confirming that the rest of us aren’t crazy.

The Rachio support team has been extremely quiet the past few months. The support was the absolute best thing about the product. Questions like this would have been addressed in 24 hours previously. The V3 update is still without any public information on release and its already mid-season (July). This isn’t normal for the Rachio team.

This feels like Rachio is seeking a sale or buyout from a larger irrigation partner. This is simply an educated guess on my part, but from seeing similar startups in the past, I wouldn’t be surprised if emergency financing or a partner buyout is being seriously looked at by the Rachio team.

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Hi all-

I understand that many of you have concerns that your flex schedule is watering too frequently, and apologize for not responding sooner. I want to be very clear in reiterating what @franz said in a very early response to this post- which was that nothing has changed in regards to algorithms. After reviewing a few accounts that had reported higher ET values and more frequent watering than last year, it was discovered that there was actually very little to no difference compared to last year. This can be seen in post #18.

@control4reak, I am sorry that our lack of response caused concern on your end. There are a couple reasons that these responses take longer. One of which is that because flex is a more complex system that has many variables, it takes a while to identify where things are going wrong. The second reason that this post in particular is difficult is because there have been no changes, and it’s very involved to pull the yearly data that Franz pulled in a previous post. Third, and finally, things are just pretty busy here over at Rachio! Season is in full swing, the community is at an all time high for engagement, and it is taking a little more time to get back to questions- especially complicated ones like this!

All of that being said, I do not want to dismiss these concerns especially because I know this group is very tuned into their systems. If you would like us to look into your system to compare your ET values, and you have not changed any zone settings that would affect flex scheduling, please comment below. For a more immediate fix, I recommend dialing your crop coefficient down to make your waterings less frequent.

McKynzee :rachio:

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I am one of those crazy people that keep a lot of data I a spreadsheet for my own analysis. At first this year, I thought things were different myself. Then I started looking back at my data since I started using my Rachio back in 2015 and I was able to see it was functioning pretty much the same. As far as weather data, I only keep track of precipitation and temperature highs and lows. The ET used by each zone by date is just too much data to capture by hand. But even with this, i can see that in my area, we had much less rain and even drought conditions the last two years. This year, I am getting too much rain!

The one change that was made last year that has impacted me is the saturation level being set at 110%. It used to be 120% and at that level things would dry out too much before it watered. But I was also in drought kind of weather and just had the occasional rain. Now with it set at 110% the soil doesn’t dry out enough before it wants to water. But I’m in a pattern where I am getting lots of rain. So that’s the only difference that I’ve seen when I go back and look at the data I’ve collected.

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Thanks for the clarification, @mckynzee.

I myself started tracking this thread at the beginning of the season, when my Flex scheduling seemed off - different than I remember it acting last year after I got it tuned in.

I think part of what I was experiencing was maybe that I had finished my tuning in at the end of the season last year, but that tuning wasn’t quite right for the beginning of a season. Which might mean I wasn’t dialing in using the best parameters, since, in theory, the ET equations and such should automatically adjust for the season.

Anyway, just a thought for some others out there - maybe I dialed into fall, which didn’t match spring. I’m sure that’s not everybody’s issue, but might be a rector for some.

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Quickly chiming in. No emergency financing or partner buyout, our company is healthy, strong, and growing. The entire team is just working hard on our new platform and products and can’t spend as much time as we’d like in the forums.

Like @mckynzee said…

The team is excited to be building some amazing things for this year and next!

:cheers:

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Those of us in regions where seasons change hope to see those changes arrive during the watering season this year. :slight_smile:

Here in the Phoenix area, we have seasonal changes, too. Hot, hotter and hottest.:laughing:

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After much analysis, last month I decided to adjust my cool season grass coefficient from 0.70 to 0.60 which is where it was last year before the default was changed. I did this to compensate for a higher than expected ET rate I observed 1 month ago. After a month with the new configuration, it seems to have helped. I think I overshot a bit since some of my lawn seems to have yellow patches. This week I adjusted the Coefficient up to 0.65 to split the difference and hopefully that will do the trick.

I am not sure why my water usage was so high last month vs this month, but once I adjusted the coefficient, the usage seems to have come back in line with what I would have expected. My water bill dropped by $124.00 between last month and the one before. I am pleased with that result.

I guess the lessons for me are;

  1. I had my system tweaked perfectly last year and when Rachio changed their default coefficients up to 0.70, I assumed that re-creating my FLEX schedules with the new coefficient value would improve my systems efficiency but it obviously did not.
  2. Don’t try to fix what isn’t broken. I still think based on my calculations that my ET rate is higher than it should be for my area but now with the tweaked Coefficient it doesn’t matter.
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ET’s have seemed to normalize since I started this thread. I did however record my highest water bill ever. We’re billed for water every 2 months and it was 110 percent higher than last year.

Bet there are others that had extreme water bills this spring as well.

Mike