I had some trouble this past week with my Iro not recording the full watering activity for the last zone run during a watering (two different days, two different last-zones). That last zone recorded half the watering amount as the other identical zones run that day. Of course, that threw off my moisture balances between the matching zones. I contacted support and they say it might be related to my controller losing it’s WiFi connection frequently. The idea was that maybe one or more of the watering cycles wasn’t getting recorded due to a WiFi disconnect. They also had me disconnect and deactivate my rain sensor to make sure that isn’t (somehow?) causing problems. I’m watching things to see if they improve now.
Anyway, that got me thinking about the “offline irrigation event buffering” topic linked above from last year. It wasn’t clear how things work from my contact with the support reps and figured others might have the same questions:
Does this buffering work any different on the Gen 1 vs. Gen 2?
What “irrigation events” are buffered (at what granularity)? A schedule run? A cycle soak of a single zone? (How would my Iro have recorded half the normal watering with this buffering in place?)
I’m using Flex Daily, but I’m interested in Fixed, if any different.
I looked through the online docs (which the support reps also pointed me to), but they don’t talk about the buffering - just about how a schedule will run:
In relation to that document:
What happens when the Iro goes offline just before or during a Flex schedule run? When will that next schedule not be run? (When do the Rachio servers actually command the schedule to run?)
A more detailed article about this would be helpful for understanding what happens. Customer-accessible wifi disconnect logs would also be nice - I had no idea my Iro has been disconnecting and re-connecting so often! (The wifi signal there is pretty strong…).
Only individual zone irrigation events, since those are really the only thing that affect future watering.
Fixed watering is less concerned with individual watering events.
If it goes offline before a flex daily run, it will run at the same time tomorrow assuming it is connected. If not connected to WiFi for at least half a day the flex backup schedule will run which defaults to every 3 days.
Fixed and flexible monthly will run as normal if not connected to WiFi.
Agreed, will try to work with the support team on this.
Thanks for the detailed reply, and I apologize for the essay of a question!
FYI, your support team determined that my Wi-Fi disconnects seemed to be correlated with some missing watering events (zone cycle finished events) in my history, which correlated with some missing watering inches applied to my moisture balance for the zone with missing events. If you want (and have time to) investigate a test case that appears to break the buffering, you might check out my logs
The support team did not seem to know about this irrigation event buffering feature in the Iro firmware. I pointed them to your post from last year, but they seemed to think that might be old information that might only apply to Gen 1 hardware or only to Fixed schedules or…
I was just thinking about this again. I know you guys are hard at work on software/firmware v3, so I wonder if this offline event buffering is still a feature in v3?
I’ve run this whole season on Fixed mode rather than Flex because I had more anomalous event history early in the season and it appeared to throw off my Moisture Levels again. It appears to me that offline event buffering was not working at all. Should it be working???
Also, I’ve noticed that my Gen 2 Iro is still disconnecting and reconnecting from WiFi, which the support guys said is the reason my recorded watering events are messed up (hence my interest in/need for offline event buffering). Did I just get an Iro 2 with a crappy WiFi controller?? I’m surprised I’ve had so much trouble but no other mention on the forums about this!
