I have a new Rachio 3 system I have been using on a fixed schedule for 8 zones. On the 3 Lawn zones, I recently transitioned to Flex Daily scheduling. It went through two cycles, watering about every 4 to 5 days. Yesterday it was supposed to go through a 3rd cycle, and I know it did because I heard the sprinklers coming on early in the morning, as expected.
At the end of the day, I checked the Rachio calendar and was puzzled to see that it showed absolutely no watering taking place on any zone for that day, fixed or flex. Furthermore, it showed that the full watering schedule for the lawns was set to run again today. This would result in double watering. I wouldn’t expect it to run any sooner than 4 or 5 days hence, but since the data somehow dropped from the system, it thought it needed to water again, I guess. I didn’t want that to happen, so I hit the FILL button on those zones so that would not happen.
Today I poked around a bit more and inspected the HISTORY log. What I found there is that the missing water runs were indeed recorded as part of the history, but with a comment similar to “Front Lawn Watered WHILE OFFLINE”. This was shown for all 7 zones that were watered. The history does not know what time the watering was done and does not record the soaks time detail, but it knows the durations.
So my conjecture, which someone can confirm, is that the controller did not have network access that morning, but it did run the schedule correctly. The actual start/stop/soak times are not stored in the controller, but once network connectivity was restored, the controller was able to properly flag that the scheduled zones were run. If so, then why does the flex daily schedule algorithm act as if it was not run at all? This appears to be a bug in the system.
Thanks for any help!
