Thanks for sticking with me on this. Just for some closure - I finally contacted Rachio support, and it turns out the issue is because I’m Canadian
Sure enough, I changed my controller location to somewhere in Maine, and the schedule I created gave me run time of 2h6 and 2h1, respectively. More in line with what I calculated with some napkin math.
Unfortunately, it won’t let me pick a weather station outside a certain radius, so I’m probably stuck with a fixed / monthly schedule until Rachio can sort that problem out. I’m a little surprised more people haven’t been vocalizing issues TBH.
With a Flex Daily schedule, if you change the time manually, Rachio assumes you are setting a time which will give the amount of water it calculates you need. It came up with a time, based on water (Soil water, root depth, allowed depletion) and nozzle properties, but you have changed the minutes. As it assumes you’ve just “fine tuned it” to get the right amount of water, so it will never change it. Unfortunately, even if you change other factors that are intended to change it.
It will, however, still adjust frequency of watering based on the moisture graph, but still assuming it’s getting the correct water. If you’ve reduced the minutes too far, the lawn will just dry out. If you’ve increased it too much, it will end up staying soggy. It has no way to correct this. (IMHO it should be impossible to change minutes on a Flex Daily schedule)
With Flex Monthly and Fixed schedules, OTOH, if you choose the Seasonal Shift option, it WILL change the minutes, and frequency with Flex Monthly, every month.
The surest way is to delete the schedule and recreate it.
It might help, I had same issue in Romania.
I set weather station with location set correctly, than changed the location to US.
It says my weather station is 7000km away which means it should keep it.
Then I deleted all the schedules and created new ones.
