If you search on Google for “rice and beans” trying to get an answer related to your Rachio 3, you may find a better answer than trying asking questions to a specialist over the phone!!!
Wow, very worthwhile and compelling post!
Care to share what you are trying to get an answer on? I’m assuming you weren’t looking for recommendations on rice and beans…
Sure. Called customer service and explained my setup:
- Indexing valve, 4 zones, no pump, city water.
Question # 1: By reading the doc from your page, it is telling me if I have an indexing valve, I will lose 3 features and rain skip wasn’t one of them. However, you video instructions says to turn off all smart features that included rain skip if I have an indexing valve. Will I lose this feature or not?
Specialist: Thats is correct Sir,
Me: What is correct? Will I lose rain skip?
Specialist: Hold on 1 min please. (Comes 30 sec later). Sir, for valves with pumps…
Me: (At this moment I interrupted him). Hold on, I don’t have a pump.
Specialist: What do you have?
After 15 min and many holds, he was able to answer.
I also had questions #2 and #3 that to get an answer was just as frustrating as #1, but you get the picture. After 40 min!!! asking basic questions that a “Specialist” should know by heart I was done and wanted to rip my Rachio from the wall and set it on fire, then I remember I paid a lot of money for it, The video instructions and documents are FAR from being helpful, non-contradictory and intuitive.
2 Likes
@wsilva - for an indexing valve use a Fixed schedule as there is no direct access to individual zones. Rain and wind skip should be fine to enable for indexing valves. If you want to convert the indexing valve system to individual valves to enable a Daily Flex schedule, there are several posts illustrating the process. It is straight forward in in the capabilities of most homeowners.
There are a couple ways to set up for an indexing valve. It looks like the video only shows one way (I believe originally the only way) to set up an index valve. A weather skip with individual schedules for each zone could throw the valve and Rachio out of sync. There are instructions for another set up method later on the page.
How do I create watering schedules with an Index Valve?
Our Delay Between Zones setting is a way to setup schedules on an indexing valve. With the delay between zones feature enabled, you eliminate the need for separate schedules.
To activate the Delay Between Zones feature, you must enable a well or pump start relay within your controller settings. You can learn how to enable this here .
When enabled, we suggest setting a 5-minute delay between the zones.
The only thing it really limits you to is fixed schedules since the flex schedules will adjust watering for each zone based on needs of the zone, and would end up throwing the cycle off.
I can’t really see why you can’t have all the rain, freeze, and wind skips enabled using the second method, but indexing valves are not my forte as we’ve never really used them out here in Arizona…
1 Like