Im new to the Rachio smart system. This is my first growing season with it. I live in NE Florida with St. Augustine grass. I’m using the flex daily setting but my grass is not getting near enough water. Im having to hand water to compensate. I look at the upcoming schedule and it’s set to water everyday for about 30 mins (flex daily). But it ends up skipping the watering on that day. Any advice to optimize this?
Rachio is a fantastic product, but you need to spend time on getting details of your yard / garden. If you tell it rubbish, you’ll get rubbish out.
So have you measured the area ?
The most important setting is then your nozzle in per hour. This is the quantity of water that your sprinklers put onto the grass. The best bet is to look at your water meter and take a reading. Then run the Rachio zone for 5 minutes. Then take another reading to get the quantity used.
You can then calculate the nozzle inches per hour with the formula
(Total Litres / Minutes / Area in m²) * 60
That’s metric but you can convert it. I assume you get the idea. So it sounds like you are overstating to the system the amount of water you are actually putting onto the grass.
Spend the time on measurements. The system will then work very well.
If you have a spare zone or two, you could actually setup some dummy zones of the same size and then adjust the likes of the nozzle inches per hour to see the exact effect of changes you makes compared to a Live zone
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