I am new to Rachio and this is my first post, but I have read and re-read everything I can find that explains how MAD works, however, I am having a problem understanding everything.
When reading this, please be aware I have my own personal weather station, so all actual rainfall measurements have come from my weather station located on my property.
I have set up all my 13 zones using Flex Daily. Coming from a traditional controller, I originally set it up using the Fixed schedule. Perhaps ironically, two days after I installed the Rachio controller, we had about 10 days of pretty heavy rain. It only watered once using the Fixed schedule, other than testing I did to be sure all my zones were correctly wired and to check to be sure all my heads are working properly (which I do about once a month).
Within day or two of when I set the controller up, I realized it could use the data from my PWS, and I set that up to update pwsweather.
Whist the Rachio (gen 2) was set up on Fixed, and having knowledge from my PWS of the rainfall, the Rachio did not water; rain skip worked great.
And during this rainy period I spent a lot of time reading about the Flex Daily, to which I have changed all my zones. I have configured all the zones with the proper plant, soil, sprinkler head type, etc., and have accepted the default results of these configurations (as shown under Advanced).
However, I have one zone (zone 1) that waters a new podocarpus hedge that is recently planted. It is a drip line, that is, a plastic pipe that has slits or holes in it every so often. The closest type of spray head I see for this is Emitter, which is how I have this zone configured.
Since this is newly planted, it needs more frequent watering until the plants take hold, and I have changed the Allowed Depletion for this zone to 75%, not that this should be the correct setting but to try and see what effect this has on how this zone waters, to try and better understand how all this works.
Currently the soil level moisture for this zone is 55% as of yesterday, and will remain 55% as of the end of today with the predicted rainfall of .07 inch (no rain has fallen so far today).
(Note the Fixed Schedule in the above screen shot is not active.)
As of tomorrow, even with the predicted rainfall of 0.27 inch, the moisture balance will be 70%.
With all this, this zone will not water for the next two weeks when I look at the Soil Moisture graphs, which end on 6/7, but when I look at the zone overview it says Next Run is 6/7 (I thought if no watering was predicted for the next two weeks it should say “Not Scheduled” – perhaps some of your help screens are out of date for the current way this works???)
My question is: why is it not watering this zone when the soil moisture is below 75% today (5/24) and tomorrow (5/25)? Is it because it thinks it might rain the next day, two days from now (5/26) where it is forecasting .88 inches of rain? If that is the case, how far ahead will it look, and how far below the Allowed Depletion will it go before it waters?
If it keeps looking ahead like this, without regard for the soil moisture going below the Allowed Depletion, it will probably never water this time of year because many days for the next two weeks it is forecasting rain.