The one thing I’m still not clear about is if the Rachio would do a full scale irrigation on a zone the very first time a zone is activated. This would be assuming a 0% AWC (i.e the soil water deficit is 100% of AWC). MAD should not be a factor the very first time.
I have a 50% MAD zone which used to be deactivated in the Rachio and had bone dry soil. I activated it yesterday and added it to my pre-existing flex daily schedule. It looks like the Rachio only added 50% of the required irrigation overnight and said it was now at 100%. Rachio apparently considered it as a normal ‘top up’ and assumed that the soil only had a 50% Soil Water Deficit. So I had to do an additional quick run for an equal amount of time to bring the ‘real’ AWC upto 100%. This doesn’t seem correct to me.