This is my second season with the Rachio controller. I’m very familiar with all the concepts, app, and my sprinkler system and lawn needs. I tried the flex daily last year and it didn’t work well at all. I basically had to manually water using me as the guide as to when not to water, for how long, and then when to start again after rain.
All of my zones are down to 20% with a allowed depletion set to 50%. Why isn’t it watering? My previous controller on auto was absolutely perfect and I never had to worry about a thing. Unfortunately they went out of business and quit supporting the app, so I had to make the switch. A little disappointed.
To attempt, I would suggest reading this entire article: What are moisture levels? (Flexible Daily Schedules) . . . does that help or did I misunderstand the issue and/or question?
The 20% you see is calculated off the 50% allowed. It really is 60%. Weird choice of display, but when you choose x% allowed depletion, the app shows 0 for (100-x)% and 100 for 100%. The scale does not map to 0 to 100 of actual water, but only the allowed depletion range, x to 100%.
20% in your case is (100 - 50 AD) + 50 AD * 20%, that is 50 + 10 = 60%
Another thing, if you tap where you see the soil moisture, you should see a graph where the top (green) line is the “total capacity”, the bottom (red) is the “allow depletion (50%)” and the blue is the "moisture level. At 20%, that point will be 20% up from the red line.
So if I change it to 20% depletion that line would move up? That would seem like the easiest variable the other being depletion rate I assume. My precious controller skydrop did the calculations in the background and you could scale up each zone with water more or water less to fine tune each zone. I never had to worry about it again.
Change the allowed depletion and observe the 20% changing, yes. The point here is that 0% is not the absolute relative moisture of the soil, it is relative to the range you want it to stay in. Very unintuitive, I can give you that.
I don’t know. If they actually ran true moisture levels, people would be panicking why Rachio is leaving their lawn so low when it comes to actual moisture levels…
I think when you understand the concept, the way it is done is almost more intuitive. My floor of 0% is my allowed depletion, and my max 100% is my field capacity of the soil type. Within that range is the sweet spot.
Well, it would not be low, the water sweet spot would just be between 50% and 100%. You would and should panic when close to 0%. It’s a matter of preference, both work once the user understands the meaning of 0%.
1 Like
