I have a six zone schedule, but it never seems to want to run all the zones. Due to rain, the last run was 6/16. Today it ran and two of the six zones did run, but four did not. In two days, it says all six zone will run but history tells me it won’t (see picture below):
How do I get all six zones to run when the schedule says to run them?
@LETanner It looks like all these zones are on a flex daily schedule. Each zone tracks to a certain moisture level (based on zone characteristics) and will only water when the zone is depleted (0% moisture). Some zones deplete faster than others due to their crop and soil types.
Are there zones that are hitting 0% depletion and not watering?
Here is more information on flex daily schedules:
I don’t know how that is being determined, since I do not have any sensors attached to Rachio. So how does Rachio know two out of six zones need more water? I thought something like that might be happening, so I defined ALL zones the same. My flower bed is listed as “cool grass” to match everything else, but Rachio still appears to be making arbitrary choices.
Crop type, soil type, and your managed allowed depletion help us track soil moisture. We derive a baseline and then subtract from that with daily evapotranspiration values and add to it with irrigation or precipitation events to perpetually keep your zone “bucket” full.
I’d recommend against this unless all zones are truly identical.
My recommendation is to start simple with maybe a front and back yard zone (put the other zones on a fixed schedule or flexible monthly which are more predictable), get them “dialed” in and determine if they are tracking correctly in regards to frequency, then roll out to other zones if working well. It really is a different way of irrigating and some yards take a little bit of time to get working properly.
I will absolutely give that a try. First, I emptied my front yard and flower bed buckets to see if I can get them to run. Next, I’ll setup different zone schedules to see if that works. All zones are not identical, but I’m new to Rachio and still trying to figure it out. Thanks for your help.
Ok great, please let us know if you have any further questions. I know there are some new concepts to understand. Some folks end up just using a fixed schedule with weather intelligence or a flex monthly schedule that updates your watering frequency once per month if they don’t like the full dynamic nature of flex daily schedules.
I would set up different schedules based on the type of vegetation — Flowers in one schedule and your lawn in it’s own schedule – it’s more efficient to have the lawn zones all in the same schedule for cycle and soak so that one zone can be watering while another zone is soaking.
