I have a schedule and set the time 20 minutes in the future.
The app schedules the run and list the scheduled run at the right time.
The time passes and the app says the next schedule is now two days into the future without having run anything.
What type of schedule is it? From your description it sounds like you’re trying Flex Daily, or maybe Flex Monthly ?
Flex daily
Check out support.rachio.com. You’ll find a lot of good stuff on there that will save you quite a bit of frustration.
What you found is something you have to get used to if you’d like the power of Flex Daily. From the support site:
http://support.rachio.com/article/382-flex-schedule-faq
If you don’t have the time or inclination to set up the data it needs to run, Flex Monthly is pretty damn’ good with less effort.
I gave it all the data, it waters twice as much as Flexi month (or at least schedules it so). And it doesn’t run when it says it’s going to run.
Flex daily computes moisture in the soil, so,many times it will predicte that it will water tomorrow but when solar radiation values, humidity, wind speed and daily percip come in and run through the model, it could push the watering out. the flex daily is running regressions to help predict what may happen and like all weather ppl, are more often wrong than right.
This is very difficult to get used too in my opinion and took me a whole season before I stopped auditing it on a nightly basis.
As far as watering more than wan, I don’t know…I found than wan was way too aggressive with my watering. I wants to run much more frequently than my daily.
The flex daily also computes the “proper” amount of water to soak a soil column so the run times can be higher than most ppl expect.
I also recommend looking at the soil database to figure out the proper awc. If you post your zip code I can compute that for ya…
@MagnusBack +1 on what @plainsane said. Ultimately Flex Daily is the more powerful of the two, but you need to be willing to put in some time and get into some details. I started off with Flex Monthly for a while while I researched Flex Daily some more, and read through these forums. Even then, I’m still tinkering with the settings. I probably don’t need to at this point to keep things alive and well, but it’s become an interesting process for me personally.
Anyway, whichever way you want to go there are plenty of people around here willing to help, and like I said those support.rachio.com articles are great.
@MagnusBack I forgot to mention, but if you’re still in Flex Daily take a look at the moisture graphs in the zone settings. You might see it will initially water a bit more frequently since it’s assuming a you are starting with dry soil. After the first few watering cycles the frequency decreased in my case as it felt it got the soil to a moisture point it needed to get to, so it could slow down so to speak.
I just don’t know. I have entered all values with the same exactness I used for my Toro TIS-612.
That thing I have barely touched in 5 years. It watered 4-5 days a week, 2 x 8 minutes or so for the lawns, this time of the season. The lawns need water more or less every day due to the strong sun.
Now the Monthly Flex says I should water for 11 minutes every 5 days. That will kill the lawn in two weeks.
The Daily flex wants to water a couple of hours per day. That will make it a swamp.
Not sure what to do.
@MagnusBack I’d go one of two ways.
- Set a fixed schedule for now to what you state above. It will give you some breathing room to dial things in.
- Try to go for it with a few changes on fixed options. Take a look at this article for the trade-offs between duration and frequency (http://support.rachio.com/article/385-flex-schedule-tips)
As 1st order of business I’d take @plainsane on that offer to get your soil type dialed in. Without the right setting there you could be chasing your tail. I can’t speak to Toro differences as I have no knowledge of it, but I can say that what I’ve seen from the Rachio Iro and reviews I’ve read, the Flex Daily algorithms are among the most powerful ones out there.
What is your pr set to, your root depth, your awc.
What is mad set to, your efficiency and your coefficient?
Also, flex monthly is weird, if you created the schedule with incorrect zone settings, you have to delete the schedule and recreate to get more reasonable default times. Else you have to manually set your run times in the durations menu, then wan will adjust your frequency from there on.
With flex daily once you alter your zone settings, the schedule should update, but for shingles, go into the duration on the flex and see new times. You might have to make subtle corrections with the +-.
I looked at
http://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/HomePage.htm
and it’s clay just as I assumed, the top layer has some “non-native” soil in the zones where I have shrubs but those are hardier and will stand some inaccuracies so not too worried.
I adjusted the grass root depth to 6 inches.
PR is adjusted to 2.25.
Haven’t touched mad, efficiency or coefficient
How far off are you with the root depth & PR adjustments from what you’d expect ? If you had warm weather grass and moved up from the default to 6" I imagine that made a fair difference. Like I said, watch the moisture graphs and see if what you see next week is any different than this week. If you’re reasonably close you might even wait for a watering or two to see if there’s a trend change. With Flex Daily always keep in mind that what you see is a prediction through the day that is current on your calendar. That part still gets me every now and then.
On that page, if you select your soil type, you will see “available water storage”. Divide that number by 60 and that is your awc.
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If he has clay soil without growth regulators, I woul stick with 6 inch.
a PR of 2.25 seems pretty high to me.
Yea I agree, especially for impact rotors
Thanks, adjusted AWS and will recalc the prc tonight when I get home again.
Changing the root depth of course had a big impact.
Even though everything isn’t perfect at least it looks to be watering at decent intervals and lengths now.
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