Fixed once a week watering—rain skip setting?

Schedules & Zones
1

I am restricted to only water once a week as per county regulations. I also have very sandy soil, so irrigation is recommended at 3/4” at a time.

I am new to rachio and it just skipped due to default rain skip threshold of .125”. So I know I need to tweak the settings for my fixed once a week schedule.

Since rain skip only looks +/- 24h, I assume I need this threshold to be pretty high to prevent skipping watering if a bit of rain comes in the day before or after. I’m targeting about 1” of water a week, maybe erring up to 1.5”/wk.

What is the recommended threshold settings for those that can only irrigate once a week on a fixed schedule?

Should I set rain skip to 1”? Or is that too aggressive? Since it won’t look at the other 5 days of the week, that would prevent watering if I’ve seen 1” recently, but otherwise add 3/4”.

Or should I disable rain skip, and instead let it just use saturation skip? Can you run saturation skip with rain skip disabled, and will saturation skip work well on a fixed schedule since it looks across the week unlike rain skip?

2

Hi there!

Welcome to the Community! I understand the dilemma that you are in with your watering restriction. Just to make sure that I do understand correctly, you need to make sure that your schedule runs unless you you receive significant rain? Is that correct?

I believe you are following the right path with the higher rain skip threshold. It is up to you, but you could start at 3/4" of an inch. I actually wouldn’t call 1" aggressive, since you need 3/4" water each watering and you are targeting 1" a week - you are just allowing yourself any deviation in precip data from local weather sources. That is how I would look at it.

You can definitely use only Saturation Skip on a Fixed schedule. I do not recommend that at this point I think the 1" threshold will work for your and I recommend keeping Saturation Skip enabled.

Have you received any rain since you first started running the schedule?