I have an issue previously noted where I have flex daily enabled and about 11 zones which when running 100% starts at 3:30am and ends about 4pm according to Rachio.
In the day time it’s about 90 currently. Watering during mid day in the 90s would result in burnt grass and most of it evaporating. While Rachio is aware of this and I’m sure eventually will issue an official, fix looking for a temp work around. To note, dividing half the zones into one schedule and half into another doesn’t work since rachio still attempts to water both in one day. Yes you could set one of those schedules to 50% moisture and the other 100%, but once it rains naturally a lot they both would be 100% and wouldn’t work anymore.
Anyhoo, so my question is would a manual rain relay work as a temporary manual fix? That is scheduled to water tomorrow at 3:30am. Once it’s say 11am, can I issue a “1” day rain delay at 11am, at which time it would stop watering. And then the following day at 3:30am it would start watering the remaining zones? Thus avoiding the issue of watering mid day?
Or by 1 day water delay would that mean rachio would delay watering until 11:30am the following day, thus defeating the purpose?
Thanks, yes that’s what I had been doing previously but wanted to switch to Flex Daily with no restrictions to get all of the benefits after quickly realizing there are some critical issues with Flex Daily (at least for people with larger lawns). So while that wouldn’t be a good temporarily work around for me, if you know the answer to the question about in regards to how Rain Delay works (in that can I use it to pause mid watering until the next day at the normal start time to resume. Or if it won’t support that. Thanks!
Oh so stopping a flex daily schedule manually mid watering, will have it automatically resume watering those remaining zones the next day at my scheduled start time?
I thought I read a while back it wouldn’t work that way, but if it does that would be a great temporarily solution, since I figured the 1 day watering delay would unfortunately be 24 hours rather than just waiting to the start time the next day.
It will won’t resume the zone you stopped most likely.
That is because that zone will probably not fall below mad by the next morning, the other zones that did not run should still be at or now below mad so they will get rescheduled the following day.
Enough times of doing this should scatter the zones that need to run across the week on a long enough time line thus less manual intervention is required
That’s fine as say I had 12 zones, when there is say one minute left on zone 6, I could stop it, as long as then the next morning at the normal start time it continues watering zone 7-12.
Are you definitely sure the other zones will continue watering? As hoping to get official confirmation here, before pausing the watering today. Sounds like it should work though, which would be great. Thanks for all your responses.
Can I correctly assume that the zones water at least 2-3 days apart on the current schedule? Meaning that they don’t water every day?
If so, another way to get the zones to split up across different days using just one schedule with all the days in it would be to take a quarter or a third of the zones out of the schedule for the next day. On that next day, add them back in and take a different quarter/third of the zones out. Then add them back in the next day, and so forth.
With either the method @plainsane recommended or this one, you are still probably going to have to go in and do this again after you get a good soaking rain as the zones will all end up at the saturation point at the same time.
I guess I am really lucky in that I have 7 lawn zones, but some are in shade and some are not, and some have different nozzles, so mine end up scattering on their own.
Oh my that sounds like a horrible amount of extra work compared to the other temporary hacks/work arounds, but thanks for the suggestion. =)
Just did the manual stop at the 10:30am today as it was just finishing one zone and now its going to automatically continue watering the other zones tomorrow morning. No extra steps needed. So I’ll still have to keep monitoring when the app to see when it will water (Since rachio sadly still doesn’t have iCal support), but any days its going to rain I’ll just set a reminder to stop manually before mid day sun, until Rachio offers an official fix hopefully in a future update by allowing one to set End Times. There is a lot more that could offer to make that even more dynamic but a basic end time would avoid the hassle.
