Recently purchased a Rachio 3. I spent a lot of time creating/editing my six zones, setting square footage, grass type, etc. The flex daily schedule has my zones running SEVEN MINUTES a day, with only one zone being 11 minutes. I ran some of my zones for 30 minutes every other day with my old irrigation controller.
I thought maybe I had adjusted a setting incorrectly… so I deleted the old schedule and created another one. Same issue. says 11 minutes for zone 1, and 7 minutes for zone 2-6.
So far, it has watered my grass every day, but my soil moisture is calculated at 0% the last two days. (50% is set as the soil depletion level for each zone)
What settings should I be looking at to fix this? Is it even an issue that my soil moisture is at 0%?
Your Available Water setting is on the low side. Is your soil type Sand? If you were watering for longer times before, and there was no runoff, then perhaps you can increase Available Water which will increase the amount of water for each irrigation event. The reason the soil moisture stays at 0% is because the Evapo-transpiration is greater or equal to the amount of irrigation. Soil moisture doesn’t shown negative percentages, so your soil could be getting drier at lower depth, and you are just watering the top layer. This won’t promote deep roots.
See this article for explanation on how to adjust Flex Daily schedule:
@moisture is correct. If your soil type is sand the system will typically want to water every day due to such a small reservoir in that soil to hold moisture.
