The reason it’s set to sand is to try to get the controller to water more often with heat.
So now because this controller doesn’t seem to be able to fully compensate for heat, I’m looking at going back to the same for fixed schedule as the hunter controller I had previously. I can’t simulate weather changed and predict that this thing is going do.
With a fixed schedule how do I set different zones to water on different days within the same fixed schedule? It seems like day skipping be is applied to all zones only? I need zones that skip days and some that water multiple times. Thanks.
I know that intuitively you would think this change would help, but things get pretty screwy when your soil settings are off. I’d recommend trying to go back to what you truly think the soil is. If you haven’t already, use the Web Soil Survey guide. Then follow up and make sure that the rest of your settings are pretty close, especially root depth and precipitation rate. Once you have all that set look at your moisture graph again and see what it’s predicting. Tweaks are easier once all that stuff is close to reality.
As an example, here is my chart from this week, when temps were hovering around 100F. You can see that it irrigated every third day.
This coming week temps are climbing to the 111-115F range. It is predicting every other day. In some cases it will actually go for two days in a row, then take a day off.
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Experts advise that we irrigate 3 days in advance if we know a heat spell is on the way. In addition, there should be a setting for Cool Season irrigation for CA native plants and a Santa Ana Wind setting for giving plants extra water since their transpiration (cooling system) is destroyed by the hot winds. Santa Ana’s take water from the soil AND from the leaves.
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Here…here I concur but first I need to spend so much time edumicatimg myself on the details of using this smart controller. I’ve ordered a rain gauge and need time to study. Thank you!
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Ok, I measured the front lawn. In what appears to be the poorest location I measured 0.015" per minute. On 100 degree days I need to water for 10 minutes in the early am and 7 minutes around 1 pm to keep the grass green every day. Now what do I need to do to figure out all the settings and make this system work?
If you feel that you in fact NEED to water in this way, your only option is setting up 2 fixed schedules, one to starts in the morning, and the other in the afternoon.
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I say get all the flex settings as accurate as possible. Sounds like your catch can was 1"per hour. If things are still stressed, increase the crop coefficient in 5% increments until it seems right.
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Hi Franz - I’ve read the many threads/requests/answers (over the last few years) for a simple schedule setting based on temperature, such as if the temperature exceeds 90 degrees. I’m in SoCal and I also have a simple need for a ‘conditional’ setting based simply/only on the outside temperature. While this isn’t perhaps an ideal watering setting (for soil types, etc.) it nevertheless fulfills my simple requirement. At present, I’ve used schedules that I’ve switched on/off based on the temperature. My question: Is there a good reason why this feature can’t be added for those of us that would use it? Thx, David
It just really hasn’t been a priority in our feature list. Have you looked at using IFTTT? You can build a recipe for just this use case.
https://support.rachio.com/hc/en-us/articles/115010379527-How-do-I-use-IFTTT-with-my-Rachio-
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Actually I’ve see requests for this feature dating back a few years and I’m surprised that it’s not on dev’s priority list. It seems to be a fairly simple to implement IMHO, you already have conditions for skipping a schedule if there is a rain, freeze, winds predicted, why not to add a option to skip a schedule if max daily temp < F and you can just use fixed schedule + skip. You have all the data under your fingers already, just add one tiny option 
. I was looking for this option as well and can’t get it to work.
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2 years later and the feature is still not implemented and IFTTT applet was deleted as well, nice :).