Flex: Not keeping the "pool" above 0

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1

Hi all,

First year Rachio user. I’ve got my Flex schedule setup pretty accurately but things seem weird.

I’ve got Kentucky Bluegrass and I’m in Nebraska. Have my custom rotors set to reflect proper GPH, IPH. My soil is loam (black dirt), full sun, flat yard. The only advanced change I made was root depth. I changed it to 2", which is still probably too deep as Bluegrass usually doesn’t root much below an inch in my soil.

We’ve had a pretty wet spring so the system hasn’t been watering much. Now that it’s dried out and the temp is getting higher (low 80’s) it running more. Since from what I understand, flex will never water longer, only more frequently. Right now it’s watering every day at .17" per day.

Here are my questions:

  1. It’s watering daily at .17" per day. The trans-evaporation (or what ever it’s called) is higher than the .17" it’s putting down, so my “pool” never gets above 0 unless it rains. Right now it’s in the low 80’s. What’s going to happen when it gets into the 90’s and 100’s? Right now it can’t keep up at 80 degrees.

  2. Does Flex really water by zone? I let the kids play in the sprinklers the other day and the “pool” was at 118% for that zone. The Flex schedule ran after that and it still put the same amount of water down as the rest of the zones. Does it really water by zone? If one zone is full does it delay watering the rest of the zones?

Just trying to get a handle on this before the really hot weather comes along and starts baking my yard.

Thanks for the help!

Mike

2

Wan behaves as you have described. If you update the new app, the old flex is now called flex daily.

if your root is only an inch, that is unhealthy turf, blue grass can get to 6. I would recommend you increase that to 6 to slightly drought stress the yard causing a deeper root.

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3

Thanks for the reply. I am running Flex, not WAN. I’ve cored several Bluegrass yards in my area and average maximum root depth is usually around 2"

I bumped mine to 3" and now it doubled my run time and still wants to run daily. I really don’t want to go much deeper as I’ll just be watering dirt. I do think that extending my root zone will make it easier to keep the pool above 0.

I also re-created my schedule as I know that they changed to a variable coefficient a few weeks back. That also seemed to make a difference.

I’m still curious about question 2.

Mike

4

It does water by zone. All my zones are in the same schedule and end up running on different days. No moisture overlap or anything.