Controllers Running After 1 inch rain

I am trying to figure out why my sprinklers ran today (Friday) when we had a 1.17 inch rain on Tuesday. I have a PWS ( KTXPLANO316) linked to my controller. It recorded the rain on Tuesday. I also have the controllers set for 0.75 inch of rain in the weather threshold section. BTW - I have 2 controllers in my configuration and their setup is exactly the same however many times they act differently even though the conditions are the same.

1 Like

I forgot to mention that the previous week we received over 2.5 inches of rain. After the sprinklers ran on Friday there was standing water all over the yard and landscape beds for over 2 days. The controllers are Gen 2.

Am I assuming the PWS give the controller enough information to discontinue the watering cycle. Right nowI have a fixed schedule active. I am thinking maybe I should switch to the Flexible schedule I have for each controller.

Any suggestions are welcome.

What settings are you using to run the sprinklers, e.g., Flex Daily, etc.?

I believe the PWS data is only used when you are running a flex daily schedule.

1 Like

Like @gaustin said, the weather skip and fixed schedules only delay until the next scheduled watering. If you want to truly account for rainfall totals with how long the delay is, you need to move to a flex daily schedule (not sure on flex monthly TBH as I’ve never played with those schedules).

I had a Fixed schedule in operation at the time of my question. During the Winter I had a Fixed Schedule for the landscape only since I am in an area of restricted watering. When it rained or there was sufficient watering based on environmental conditions, I would get a saturation notice which would disable a run. The saturation notice did not occur this time. I have now changed to the Flex Daily schedule I will run through the summer.

Thanks for the replies. That is what I thought about the PWS and Rachio controllers.

We have water rationing too. For me Flex Daily works well even with day-of-week.

I was wondering about your weather station, but thought to ask about the setup first. I’ve been using the nearest NOAA weather station (2.x mi) but with several WeatherUnderground stations a lot closer I decided to try one of those.The Rachio failed to pickup recent rain data from the WU station and was scheduled ready to water my soaked lawn. I switched back to the NOAA station and within minutes it had picked up the rain data, calculated and filled each zone accordingly.

I don’t know if it’s an issue with that one WU station or the way Rachio implements the WU stuff, but under the local restrictions I don’t want to find out.

7

I have an Ambient Weather PWS on my property. A neighbor about 0.25 mile also has a PWS, but I am not sure what brand it is. I have read some posts about Rachio not getting periodic updates from PWS’s. In fact, the rain we had last week did not appear in the controller schedule timeline until after I posted this question. In fact, I accessed the PWS through WU and PWS Weather around the same time I first posted the question. Last night we had an additional 2.66 inches of rain and I saw it in the timelines for each controller. @Gene has been the go to guy with regards PWS information so I tagged him on this message. Maybe I need to access my PWS through an app (maybe WU) at least a few days a week to make sure data is being transmitted. In the meantime, I will disable the Fixed schedules and enable the Flex Daily schedules. Our restrictions right now allow me to water on Tuesday and Friday - midnight to 9:00 AM and 6:00 PM to midnight. I usually have the controller with the most zones on the morning shift and the other controller on the night shift.

Unlike the fixed schedules (which only look forward in time for rain data), flex schedules take the recorded rainfall into the account as well. Switching from fixed to flex is already a good move to resolve your issues.
After you’ve switched to flex schedule, post a photo of the moisture graph of at least one zone which watered before it should have. It’s possible that you will need to adjust your zone settings to increase the rain retention which Rachio would consider.
Usually during heavy rains (such as 2.66" in one night), Rachio will cap the moisture at 110%, treating anything extra as a runoff loss. As such, if your moisture graph shows that you’ll likely deplete 100% moisture in a couple of days, extra 10% will not have much of an effect two days after a heavy rain.
Again, seems you’ve been using fixed schedule. Meaning that on the day your controller was to run, it looked at the weather forecast in the next couple of days, saw that there were no big rains coming up, and run the cycle. Regardless of what happened yesterday.
Flex schedule on the other hand will remember the rain from last night, and determine that your yard has enough to skip the schedule this time.

1 Like