I am sure this is probably been answered before, but I can’t find a recent response about it. I don’t understand the concept of end before sunrise. I know that watering at night invites disease and rot in your lawn. Am I missing something about this feature? It seems counterintuitive.
For my lawn, I actually use end before sunrise and have yet to have any disease issues (of course, that does not mean it will not or you may not have the same results). Basically, Rachio knows what the maximum time is for the zone, knows what time the sun will rise, and will start at sunrise minus the maximum time. Unfortunately, if a zone is not watered because of the water content is higher than the rest (for example), the run time does not take that into account when starting . . . it is always subtracting the maximum time. Does that answer your question? This has been an issue for quite some time. It would be nice to fix @dane & the Rachio crew.
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The issue is usually water sitting OVERNIGHT on the lawn. Ending by sunrise is usually ok because once the sun is off and residual water starts to evaporate off, you are in the clear. Now, I live in AZ and have NEVER had issues with watering at any point of the day or night, so your mileage may vary.
My soil is a loamy sand (pretty high sand content), so I have yet to see any water sit while in the liquid state.
In the past, I have watered during the night and had it end around 4 AM or so. I have horrible clay soil here in Central Wyoming so that water will sit on top for sure. I have never attempted to water with all cycles ending at sunrise and let the sun do it’s thing. I guess it’s all going to come down to how much standing water is remaining. My telltale sign is mushrooms in the yard. I have been able to use that as an early indicator before more serious issues occur. I do like the idea of ending before sunrise so you get that evap with the sun plus your watering is done before that no water zone during the day. For us, summer heat is mainly between 10-5 PM. The settings I have now is end before 10 AM. I guess that will be my solution if I get too much standing water for the sun to burn off. So for those who have commented. Hard clay soil but plenty of sun. Think I will be ok? Troy, I read that you are in AZ. If I remember correctly, you guys also have hard-impacted soil (clay) in that area as well. You stated you haven’t had any problems.
Here in the desert, the hottest time of the day is typically 4 pm so the soil is hot at sunset so I like to stop watering right at sunrise.
Hacky solution: create one daily flex schedule per zone, all ending at sunrise. You’re welcome. 
Thank me later. Ignore warnings, it works. 
LE: still trying to figure out the order in which the zones go, and if there is anything I can do to randomize them so the same zone does not always start at the same-ish time.
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How does that work? The zones will not all start at the same time?
For your location, Rachio looks up or calculates the sunrise time. Then it subtracts the full run-time for each zone in the schedule to calculate the start time. This is whether the zone is going to run the full time, partial time, or not at all.
I believe the “hacky solution” will end up running one zone before sunrise and the rest will come on one at a time after sunrise.
I had to set all my lawn zones (6) on separate schedules that end at a specific time like Ady624 suggested which has been working better so far.
With them all on a single schedule, even if 1/6 zones is scheduled to run, the system is not smart enough to realise that only 1/6 zones needs to run before sunrise, let’s say 5am, and instead adds up all six zone’s runtimes only to have the single necessary zone start at 11am the night before. Which defeats most of the purpose of the “End before” and “End before sunrise” settings. Very frustrating.
A cherry on top is I have the 12 zone system and Rachio only allows 16 schedules total so I had to reduce my heatwave syringe schedules, and completely delete all my schedules I had programed for seeding.
Just a heads up for anyone reading in the future ripping their hair out.
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They push and shove each other so that they all run before sunrise. There are two downsides:
- hammer reduction does not work as one schedule has to end before the next one starts, so the two zones no longer briefly overlap to avoid the hammer.
- each schedule is decided on at a different time, it happened a couple times, based on forecast, that only a few of the 8 zones ended up running and I manually ran the rest after sunrise.
Sunrise is at 6:38am tomorrow.
it actually runs all or some before sunrise. It acts exactly like we expect one multi-zone schedule to behave, but with more hammer effect.
Here is an example of when it decided to skip 6 of the 8, the two that ran still finished at sunrise. I then manually ran the rest. This happened twice I believe, have not kept counts.
That is good to know that it works as expected with all the zones ending before sunrise. I have not tried it and was not expecting it to work that way, so awesome. Good work Rachio.
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