I had one my lateral drip lines pop at 2 am during a scheduled watering cycle of my vineyard pouring 1300 gallons of wasted water onto the vineyard. It went the entire cycle (1 hr) without shutting off despite being accurately calibrated and connected. Really crappy hardware I’d say. I’m having nothing but trouble with these flow meters (I have 3) and am about to return them all for a full refund.
Anyone else experiencing the same issue?
So, if the flowmeter recorded 1300 gallons, how is it the flowmeter’s fault that the system did not shut off? Sounds like a software problem.
The flowmeter is not a valve. It simply tells you how much water is flowing. It cannot turn off anything by itself.
The flow meter is sold and advertised as being able to detect leaks and restrictions, and the controller to respond to it. That’s my understanding of how it works.
Software might be the issue, or user settings or setup. I would be upset too, if i had the sensor installed and woke up to a lake after the calibrated procedure and it knew it was a leak.
I think it is a software issue. I’m aware that the flow meter is not a valve and is simply in place to report flow-data. So the issue seems to be the the controller did not respond. The valve shut off fine when the cycle finished so it’s not the valve. That leaves the calibration and settings to question. I had recently calibrated (try to weekly actually) and here is a screen shot of the settings:
My frustration lies in the system as a whole failing…aware that the flow meter is not a valve. Thats pretty apparent. The flow meter in general is not that well built. The range is not at all what Rachio claims it is and there are more people seemly having issues with it that not.
The evidence you have presented seems to be that the zone was calibrated at 6.5gpm and the flowmeter reported about 21gpm (1300 gallons in 1 hour). This would seem to pretty clearly to be a problem with the controller or the software.
Was the auto-shutoff setting turned on for the zone? I am assuming also that Enable flow monitoring was turned on and the high and low triggers were set appropriately.
Might be helpful if you can provide the settings you were using for that zone.
Yes absolutely…all settings appeared to be correct for auto-shut off to happen correctly. I’m wondering if Rachio Support has the ability to look at my controller data and see why it didn’t happen?
I am not sure, because I only had a high flow event once, but I think the zone completes and then gets locked out for future runs. I don’t think the zone shuts off immediately.
