I live in Southern California. I set up rachio over the weekend. Generally love the product but now I am thrown off by the schedules.
I am very confused on the system setup. I did the setup and went to flex daily. I did do advanced zones and picked soil water inch/inch rate and adjusted Sq Footage. I have about 9 zones with lawn and trees.
Before I used to do about 3 to 6 mins/zone depending on the season. Now Rachio programming is setting up the schedule for nearly 20-30mins/zone. Wow thats a lot of water.
Not sure what your old system used to be, but generally Rachio software tries to perform deep, infrequent watering in order to promote root growth and drought resistance. You can make reasonable adjustments to the watering times, more on this here (link), but I am curious how your new schedule compares with the old setup on the weekly / monthly basis. For example 20 minutes every 4 days may end up saving water overall, compared to 5 minutes daily, because any rainfall will stay in the soil for longer with deeper roots.
@vishnu80 Like @Gene mentioned, what was your watering frequency before (not minutes but days)?
Also noticed that your zones were setup with cool season grass which has a 6 inch root zone depth, meaning you will water more frequently (but less). Assuming you are a warm season grass which has a 9 inch root zone depth which will have you watering much less frequently (but longer durations).
At any time you can also adjust minutes if they are too high.
Your watering graph looks good, it will extend out a lot if you change the crop type to warm season grass. Let us know if you have followup questions.
Any new information on this? I am new and all summer i ran a fixed schedule and it performed great. Now that the rains here in LA come and go i see the downfall of these fixed schedules. it was watering even though i the ground was completely saturated. I need to start on flex daily. How do i start?
You could turn on saturation skip for your fixed zones but you’ll have to do some thinking and entering values into the advanced zone settings. I have one zone on a fixed schedule and I’ve got over 1 hour of saturation skips in the last month (and it’s been reasonable).
If you do switch to Flex Daily, try a single zone first. The root depth and precipitation rates are critical so be willing to find those values and/or guess and check. Choose a good nearby weather station for best results (wx stations provide precipitation information to Rachio). If you’re miles away from a station and have Rachio 3, then Weather Intelligence+ may be the only way to go but it won’t be perfect. My flex daily zones have been full of soil moisture so they too haven’t watered in over a month.
Flex daily means that when it waters, it goes for 30 min. However it won’t water every day even if you allow it to. It will skip until things are dry again.
