My home has lots of zones with many different needs. Even for the grass, we have the front yard and back yard on different schedules because the front yard needs to comply with city watering restrictions and in the backyard I give it more flexibility in order to allow it to water when it’s best for the grass (even though I’m technically still in violation). My problem is that each grass zone takes 70-109 minutes to run! So if both front yard and back yard grass run on the same day, my backyard isn’t starting until the sun is well up (and I cannot use the “finish before x:00” feature because my pipes are too loud inside the house and would wake us all up). And to top it all off, our property is slightly sloped everywhere, so we have lots of short watering times with long soak cycles.
Is there anyway you can add more zones to your schedule? We optimize for many zones and try to keep the cycle soak time as low as possible by running as many zones as possible while others are soaking.
Unfortunately, no. I have 3 grass zones grouped together in the backyard that can run any day of the week, and 2 grass zones in the front yard that can only run 3 days a week. When they both go on the same day then watering occurs all morning.
I second this. My Zones #3 & #6 cycle soak, but Rachio only appears to interleave “forward.” Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Zones #4, #5, & #6 will interleave with cycle soaks on Zone #3, but #1-5 will not interleave with Zone #6. Similarly, my Zones #1 & #2 will not interleave with #3. It leads to longer durations.
I understand that this is easy logic for humans but not for a relatively simple machine like Rachio (which still maintains some of the logic of a traditional controller). But this is similar to scheduling Finish Before Sunrise, where the desired outcome is to minimize the start-to-finish time by always having the water running.
I have no intention of re-wiring my base and reprogramming my zones to make this work.
Can’t you setup a schedule with all zones 3 days a week and another all other days (using restrictions or specific days depending on schedule type) with just 3 grass zones? This should solve this problem of stacking and will minimize duration for “all zone” runs.
