Home | Support | Status Page

App Feature or Tragic Flaw

Schedules & Zones
#1

When the Flex Daily schedule does not adjust to provide enough water for a hot and dry season, you cannot use a Quick Run to catch up on the watering. Any Quick Run water added is then subtracted from the Flex Daily schedule. This leaves my yard brown and dormant.

There is no way to ‘catch up’ on deficient watering provided by the Fex Daily schedule. I have to get out my hose and sprinkler for additional watering! This is not a desirable solution!

It makes no sense for the Quick Run to take away water from a schedule. This appears to me to be a flaw in the logic of the Rachio system.

#2

Go to the zone(s) in question, and click on the soil moisture, and “empty” the zone.

Although, I’d be curious to see your settings and see if they couldn’t be dialed in a bit more. Mine do pretty well here in Arizona (minus some plants that just flat out don’t do well with multiple 110+ temps) with zero intervention on my part.

#3

You crop coefficient is probably too low, or another setting is off

#4

That works once, but it’s a pain for multiple zones to keep up.
I have worked with support to tweak the zones, and I keep getting flip-flopped on what to do. Whatever one person says is best is wrong with the next.
The problem exists a few weeks out of the year when it gets hot. The system just does not ramp up enough to keep the grass from going dormant or dying.
I could easily add extra watering time with a scheduled job, but that does not work.

The fact remains, that you cannot catch up if the system does not provide enough water during its flex schedule. I need the ability to do supplemental watering.

#5

Like @Gerardv514 said, there might be a zone setting that could be tweaked a bit. But if you want to easily correct it, go into the advanced settings and adjust the crop coefficient up 10-15 points. That will tell Rachio that the moisture is depleting faster, forcing the system to run more often. Adjusting the root depth more shallow can accomplish similar.

#6

This was a problem for me too, however this year Rachio rolled out dynamic crop which has been 110x’s better for us. It watered every 2-3 days early spring and has been watering every other day in July and it appears august will be the same.

Post screenshots of your zone settings and advanced settings. Additionally you need to figure out how long does it take to get a half inch of water down into the grass.

#7

I beg to differ I have not had to manually water or intervene. The only time I do is when I fertilize and need to water something in, or if the little one wants to run thru the sprinklers. In that case I’ll manually open the valve so that Rachio doesn’t include that.

1 Like
#8

I may have found the problem. I had an extra Scheduled Job that I used when over seeding the yard. This job was still Enabled, but the End Date was last October. It appears the system was still subtracting the water from this job, even though it was not actually running.

#9

If that schedule is not running, it should not affect anything. Something else must be going on.

#10

@KCLASSEN Don’t think so. Like @twin1 said, if the zone end date is past, and it hasn’t been running, the schedule isn’t subtracting it out.

#11

I agree, That wouldn’t be the issue.