My Rachio 3 seems to have suffered a nervous breakdown. I have two Rachio 3’s located on properties about seven miles apart, both on Monthly Flex. The one at my home went online last fall and has been working fine so it is my benchmark. The one at the other property went online in February 2020. The run time at that property ranged from 53 minutes to 52 minutes with soak times for a couple of zones for February through April 21 with the frequency at two day intervals in April. Then, on April 23, the system went berserk. The run time went to 187 minutes with numerous soak times and one zone running and soaking for five cycles. The frequency interval went from two days to eight days with the next watering due on May 1. I did not receive any email or app notifications re these sudden changes. My instinct is to leave it alone until May 1 or a few days later to see what the next Monthly Flex schedule will be. I may have to do a manual run if the plants demand it. I haven’t seen a problem like this on this forum and I am very pleased with the Rachio 3 at my home so I hope this will be self correcting or a simple fix.
I wouldn’t worry about the soak time. That changed because of the run time. But I would worry about that run time. Can you double check the zones to make sure they are still set up the way you had them last year? That would be where I would start in debugging this.
I checked zone set-up and they are the same. I just now changed about half the zones from clay to silty clay and that resulted in a 134 minute total time and a six day frequency which is still a very big difference from how it was running since initial set-up last Feb. and the first three weeks of April. I’ll see what happens in May. Still don’t why such a radical change without any notification.
Thank you for the response.
May 1st has arrived and there is no change in the wacky schedule and no Flex monthly adjustment made and, of course, no email notifications. I have changed the soil type for a couple of zones and will wait a few more days to see if anything changes. My controller at home meanwhile, has made a Flex Monthly change, I received an email notification and the watering frequency has gone to two days which is what I might expect.
Do you by any chance have any unused zones on the wacky controller? If so, you could set up a test zone and see how it reacts.
Do you mean a phantom zone with no physical connection to a valve but configured as though there was a zone?
Yes.