Help, Rachio started killing my plants!

With summer here, I created 6 schedules, 3 schedules in morning for grass, plants, flowers. 3 schedules in evening for grass, plants, flowers, to run every day.

These are set as Flex Monthly, and all water intelligence is turned off, all watering skips are turned off, so every day it should run 6 schedules.

However, when I look at history, it looks like the Rachio only runs 2-3 or 3-4 schedules, and in the future, random days with zero rain, it’s showing only 2 or 3 or 4 schedules being run, not all 6 schedules.

Why is the Rachio arbitrarily deciding to randomly not run some schedules? There is no rhyme or reason for this!

This nearly killed my plants. Now I have run these manually every day, which defeats the purpose of the stupid smart irrigation system! Even a manual irrigation system with manual schedules is way more reliable than this piece of junk.

I’ve had the Rachio for 3 years and it’s infuriating that the system is so unreliable, even with basic programs!

Why not just create Fixed schedules if you want them to run daily for fixed times? Try making those schedules Fixed and see how that goes - disable rain skip.

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Yes, I deleted all schedules and made them all fixed schedules.

I thought flex monthly would be semi-intelligent, turns out it’s garbage. With the hot weather, flex monthly has been skipping random plant & flower & grass schedules with no rhyme or reason on each day.

I thought flex monthly only adjusted the overall watering times once per month as the weather heats up or cools…it shouldn’t be randomly skipping watering schedules!

Using fixed schedules hopefully fixes this garbage! Nearly lost a dozen of my trees and plants due to this horrible software.

I would suggest looking at your moisture content graph for at least one of those zones to start the understand what is causing it. Maybe even post an image of it with the settings, especially advanced, for that zone.

I have never seen moisture content for any of my zones, when on flex monthly or fixed. I googled this a bit and it appears the moisture content is only available in flex daily, which I do not use, and that only flex daily might take the moisture content into account.

Correct me if I’m wrong though. Thanks.

Ooops, I believe you are right, my mistake. The settings still might be helpful.

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Thank you. I have been using Rachio without issues for 3 years. It seems this all started 2 weeks ago, which coincides with the new release of features from Rachio. Somehow their software changes caused my zones to go haywire and the cloud servers to decide to stop running my schedules 70-80% of the time for my plants nearly killing them all.

I’m a bit worried about this now and will stick to fixed schedules from here on out. It is very concerning that their “weather intelligence” or whatever other algorithms can start randomly stopping watering zones even as the weather heats up significantly.

Now it seems I have to “fight” the Rachio instead of using it with a simple monthly flex schedule that adjusts watering times up or down automatically based on monthly weather average changes.

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Yes, I found to my sorrow that all those smart features in Rachio can’t be trusted.
Also had to resort to fixed schedules.

Been running Flex Daily schedules here in Arizona for over 8 years and hasn’t skipped a beat. Those smart features surely can be trusted, if someone is willing to take the time to set everything up correctly.

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Because you chose flex when you should have chosen fixed

Yes when they updated their software our old schedules transferred over but they changed some settings specifically with flex scheduling. This could cause conflict and Rachio didn’t warn its users unfortunately.

I recommend you start from scratch making sure you are accurate with soil type, angle of land, watering sprinkler head selection, etc…as they recommend duration based on your set up. You can use flex and rely on season change but you have to decide if turning off rain skip makes sense for your location. Cycle and soak could be a culprit based on your soil type set up too!

I would just make fixed schedules to operate the way you want them to run and depending on the zone type (drip vs grass) maybe turn off rain skip