Help with drought situation in California

  1. I’ve set up a flex schedule and specified which days (my city only allows on certain days: Sunday, Wednesday, Friday). In the setup section it has a choice called “or repeats” with choices of “any day”, “odd”, or “even”. Does this mean the Iro may run on other days as needed as I don’t want that to happen…

  2. I started with a fixed schedule where the Iro decided I should run my 4 stations for a total of 38 minutes on those 3 days. Now with the flex schedule it says it does not need to run until “after November 27th” but when it does run it says “114 minutes”. That’s almost 2 hours! I’d love to understand why it thinks that is ok…

If you have only chosen S, W, F for flex schedules, then it will only run on those days.

If you contact [support@rachio.com] they can help review your account and help determine if the correct attributes have been chosen for your particular zones. Without seeing your actual layout (crop types, nozzle types) it’s tough to give an exact answer.

One thing to note on flex schedules, the more they are limited (i.e. only a few days per week), the less value you will see. Flex schedules will know that you can’t run until a certain day and might try to top off the zone until the next watering day. The best case for flex is any day, so they can run flexibly. Just a heads-up. I understand the restrictions you have put in place by the city. You can experiment with both (fixed/flex) and see which works better.

[support@rachio.com] can also help you dial in the system if you need it.

Thanks and have a great day.

:cheers:

@pdawg17, are you watering warm season turf by chance? If so, the root zone depth might be the “root cause” of this watering duration :wink:

Flex schedules work by refilling your zone’s “gas tank” as needed per the allowed depletion threshold; we default to 50% allowed depletion (or gas tank half full/empty). The biggest variables to your watering duration will be the root zone depth, soil type, and nozzle precipitation rate to determine how big your zone’s gas tank is and how long it takes to refill it.

Happy to review these settings in more detail with you. Is there a particular zone that concerns you, or all of them?

Best, Emil

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I don’t mind using the fixed schedule other than the fact it seems to water without concern for recent rain. Recently it did “normal” cycle when 2 days earlier we got an inch of rain. That’s what brought me to trying the flex schedule.

All the zones concern me because all 4 zones are close to 30 minutes each. They are not scheduled to come on until November 27th but am still surprised that that much watering will be done.

No the 2 stations with lawn are set to cool season grass in clay loom soil with “some shade”. Rainbird 12H’s are used. What other info would you like?

@pdawg17, fixed schedules use the weather intelligence feature to check for rain roughly 1 hour before your scheduled watering time. At this time, the weather checks looks ahead 24 hours and back 24 hours. Rain 24+ hours before the schedule is compared to ET over the same time period and will skip the schedule if precipitation exceeds ET. The following notification is sent via email for ET delays:

Did you have a chance to check your moisture graph to ensure the weather station the Iro is using observed the same amount of rain?

Are all of these zones the same nozzle type? Rainbird 12H’s?

Is ticking every day in flex as able to water the same as “or repeats” being set to “any”?

@obmd1 Same.

:cheers: