How to make Flex Schedules and Weather Intelligence work

Hi @Spanish-garden

I think that @rraisley is correct. I would suggest that you delete the schedules, set your system to point again at a US City and PWS, create the Flex Daily schedule(s) and while creating it, set the duration for 20 mins and Save before resetting back to Madrid.

The other thing to do is the run the zone for 5 minutes and Nate the quantity of water used from your water meter. You then need to calculate the nozzle inches / cm per hour from this.

So the formula for mm/hr flow rate will be Total Litres Flow / Minutes run / Area in m2 x 60:

One of my zones 346.5m2 used 0.836m3 in 5 minutes - so 836 litres / 5 min / 346.5 m2 x 60 = 28,95, so 2.895cm

And is the root depth correct ? 31cm seems very long.

I will try this and report back. The root depth, I guessed it as there is a huge maple tree in that zone, surroundes by grass. When you say “save”, what do you mean? Is there a “save settings” optiom somewhere? I haven’t seen it. Thanks!

Won’t that lock in the 20 minutes again, preventing it from updating or calculating a correct time from the zone’s settings>

When you have multiple crops in the same area, like your maple tree and grass, you need to set the root depth to the shallower item, in this case the grass. Otherwise, the grass will die out in how weather. Shallow depth = watering more often, so the grass does fine. The tree will draw off moisture too, so adding more moisture at the tree itself is great but not always possible. You may just need to water the zone a bit more to handle the tree.

Probably not as many as I was making out. There is on Advanced settings.

The problem I certainly have is that my system would not , under any circumstances, automatically calculate the watering needed. I was on to support and they basically said in the end that they could do nothing as the system was not in the US or Canada and would therefore not work correctly, but were unable to confirm as to what exactly would or wouldn’t happen. At the time, we deleted the whole thing and recreated it.

So I just water for 10 mins at a time, and the system waters now about every 3 or 4 days

So when you create a new schedule (using what kind of schedule, now, I’m losing track), Rachio has to put a time in for each zone. But you’re saying that the time in the zone has nothing to do with your zone’s variables?

Such a shame after all you’ve been through on this. Well, I think we were told that Flex Daily didn’t work outside the U.S. & Canada, but still.

While I don’t think Flex Daily could work, would your idea of telling the system you’re in a location within the U.S. work with Flex Monthly? But still, even though climate may be similar, rainfall certainly wouldn’t be.

Sorry, don’t get me wrong, I’m using Flex Daily. It varies the watering of zones, based on the settings of each zone, and based on the weather, and I have to say that it is working better than expected. Our Jan to Mar usage was down by about 70% and this translates to maybe about $1000 of a saving. I would expect our Mar to May reading to be taken any day now, with the bill in about 3 weeks time (around 8 June).

During Flex Daily setup, if I left my system as Mojacar, Spain, it calculated each zone as Zero minutes

To be honest, I’m more than happy to leave things as they are right now. The grass is green. We bought a simple meter probe from Amazon and the meter moisture level is getting close to what the Rachio says. So temperatures are in the mid 20’s C and we are watering “lots of sun” zones about every third day

@Spanish-garden I’ve deleted my schedules and re-created them again. I first tried to create a Flex-Daily schedule using Mojacar, Spain as my address. It would not calculate any timings for each zone - so each zone said 0m and the overall total was 0m too. I could manually hit the + and therefore set each zone for maybe 10 mins.

I deleted the schedule, changed my location to a street in San Antonio, TX and selected a local PWS, and created my schedule. It created most zones with 13m, one for 12m and one for 18m (which made sense - these were two zones where the water quantity was actually measured). I left the zones with their calculated timings. I then reset my location back to Mojacar, Spain.

So I’ll leave this like this for a while and see how it works out.

@rraisley will Flex Daily try and water to 100% each cycle, and will it potentially dynamically change the duration of this watering ?

Flex Daily usually does not change the duration or amount watered at one time. It only varies the frequency of watering, depending on rain & irrigation received and ET used.

But that information (ET) is based on local weather, so I don’t know how it will work in Spain.

Ok, so there is little or no difference between me setting the number of minutes of watering per zone manually vs the system automatically calculating it. Ok, so I was using 10 mins watering per zone and it calculated 13 mins. But the main thing is that it works off our PWS. And therefore, that 13 mins will last varying number of days, based on the local weather (and of course the season).

Did someone say that? If the system has has the minutes, it has calculated the value using all the inputs. A manual setting can be anything, completely different than what is required.
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Ok, so I was using 10 mins watering per zone and it calculated 13 mins. But the main thing is that it works off our PWS. And therefore, that 13 mins will last varying number of days, based on the local weather (and of course the season).
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If Rachio calculates 13 minutes, and you change it to 10 minutes, Rachio will still think it put the same amount of water down (which takes 13 minutes to do), and will space that water amount out and calculate when to water accordingly.

Hi,
Reading your attempts to make flex work I was thiunking I give it a try and create a daily flex schedules for the zones. Followed the same procedure as describved above: deleting schedules, changing location to US/CND. select PWS, create schedules, change back location instaaled site, select weather.

Schedules were calculated and it looked if thing worked. Last weekend a lot of rain, and I noticed schedules changing and the soil moisture increased to 110% for each zone. Sun was shining again, temperatures increasing and I saw the zone moisture levels going down again and coming to 0%. this night the zones were activated again

I notice some strange things which I’m not sure if these are correct;

  • looking to the calender I notice only this month/ next weeks are showing shedules will run almost every day. Last days of the month and the following months are empty.
  • zones show a moisture level of 0% after the zone has run. The zone moisture balance is giving a figure which is much higher (78-99%). To me this looks if rain is increasing soil moisture while the schedules not increase the soil moisture levels.

    image

Anyone an idea if this coudl be correct? and why soil moisture is not increased by sprinkler ?

So, you’re outside North America, but are using Flex Daily linked to a U.S. city, but a local PWS for rain? I was thinking that didn’t work out well for those who tried it. My concern with Flex Daily are the great swings in ET (Crop Evapotranspiration) due to local temperature variations, which are not going to be the same as yours. For example, your graph shows a big jump on 6/10 to 0.38 which means an extremely high temperature, yet that same thing will probably not happen at your location. I can see Flex Monthly working well this way, as it uses average, historic temperatures, but am concerned with Flex Daily.

I can see from your irrigation values (0.38") and ETs (0.11 to 0.38) that there will probably be times where it does water every day. It makes me question the irrigation values as possibly being too low. What are your Advanced settings?

What do you mean by “Last days of the month and the following months are empty.”? Rachio only predicts up to 2 weeks ahead, so how do you know what following months will end up like?

I can’t tell what date the 0 percent was for, but assume it’s for 6/8, and it did last water 6/7, and is going to water at 10:39 pm 6/8. So, for 6/8, Rachio assumes it has used the ET value (going from the previous 0.29 (78%) down to 0.00 (0%), which would be correct, before it irrigated at 10:39 pm. I do question the irrigation at 10:39 pm; I assume you have End Before Sunrise or a time selected, and it’s a long watering? It really isn’t best to water at night, but there can be specific conditions that require it.

Bottom line: The graph looks about right and seems to be working okay, but I highly question using another location thousands of miles away for your Flex Daily schedule, and I wouldn’t mind checking your Advanced settings to confirm the watering amount.

Thanks for your response
Indeed the system is installed in Europe. Actually I was just looking for a confortable way run the zones run with a seasonal shift, depending on rain (including forecast) and beein able to control the system by smartphone instead of walking to the controller. Previously I used a standard rainbird controller which I had to adjust manuallly every week, and sprinklers running while I saw dark rain clouds coming nearby. Coming back from holiday (last years we had extreme hot/dry summer) I found back the desert in my garden.

For creating the schedules I’ve used a location in canada for which climate conditions are similair.

Last evening (8/6), this morning (9/6) the system run some zones and for 3 out of 4 I saw the soil moisture increasing form 0% to 20%,

For each zone I used default advanced setup except area (m2) and the nozzle (cm/hr). The screenshot below come from the same zone. This zone has 3 rainbird 5000 sprinklers using standard nozzle nr 5 (I think is is) at 3,5 bar. 2 are doing do half a circle, 1 is doing 1/4 circle


Do you suggest flex monthly would be a less worse solution as flex daily ?

If you are actually using weather for a location thousands of miles away, I think Flex Daily can be very inaccurate. You know how during the same period of time, temperatures and weather can vary greatly, and Flex Daily will try to accommodate conditions that do not exist in your location With Flex Monthly, settings only change every month, so if average weather is similar in each location, it would I think be better. I do think that using the unit outside the US/CDN may continue to be problematic.

HI @Mauske

Can you please confirm - did you change your location AND the pws back to your Local Area ? You MUST change BOTH of them. The idea of moving the location is only to allow for A Flex Daily schedule to calculate the best duration for each time of watering.

My system is in Spain and it works perfectly. I adds moisture when it rains and it removes moisture depending on the local temperatures.

I the Available Water seems to be low. Is this the value it created or did you adjust it ? Mine is 0.15mm/mm

However, the big important value is the Nozzle Centimeters Per Hour. So you are telling the system that if you run the sprinkler for one hour continuously, and if you had a jar sitting on the grass collecting water, after one hour it would only be 1.08cm in the jar ? That seems very low to me. Mine calculated a default value of 3.81cm

@rraisley kindly gave me a formula to calculate the Nozzle Centimeters per hour

(Litres / Minutes / Area m2) * 60

In my case, I used 505 litres in 5 mins over 145 m2 - so (505 / 5 / 145) * 60 = 41.8mm (4.18cm)

So if you have a water meter in your house, make sure that all taps are off, run the system for 5 mins and get a reading before and after.

If you give Rachio rubbish information, it will give a rubbish result

You have a commercial grade system, with a very high flow rate. Some of my values are closer to the 1.08 cm, with nothing over 2.5 cm.

Hi @championc

I can confirm: I changed my location and the PWS back to local area. 1st I changed Ws to a PWS nearby later I changed it to the setting “weather network”. And indeed befor using this procedure Rachio calculated 1 or 3 minuts for each zone. When I used this procedure the Rachio calculated reasonable times (25-30 minutes for each zone).

I’ve not changed any zone settings except nozzle setting (m3/h) and the area (m2). I can’t check the litres on a water meter since I use groundwater. The pump is capable doint 4.5-5m3 and hour at 4.5 bar. Because of the amount water used and the lengths to the spinklers, the presure at sprinklers are around 3 bars.

I calculated the ccm/h with the nozzles.
This zone covers together with an identical zone an area of 520m2. So I devided this by 2 = 260m2 for this zone.

For this zone I used 3x rainbird 5000. 2x nozzle 6 which does 1,03m3/h with a diametre of 13.9 metres and 1x nozzle 4 which does 0,8m3/h with a diametre of 12.7 metres
Lets assume (2x 1.03m3/h + 1x 0.8m3/h) / 260m2 = 0,011m/h ==> 1,1 cm/h.

@ rraisley: thats what I calculated. All zones except 1 small zone and a dripline use rainbird 5000 or 3000 sprinklers and are around 1-1.5 cm/h. The small zone has fixed heads (1800) and is around 3.5cm/h and the dripline is 1.12 cm/h

grtz

So if you are only running for 1 - 3 mins, with only 1.1cm/h, then the amount put down would seem tony and therefore, I think you would indeed have almost zero% most of the time.

I will say that I changed the time manually and it did indeed record an increased quantity of water. So maybe increase one zone to 5 or 10 mins and confirm that it does indeed see and work off the increase.

But one thing is for sure, Flex Daily works outside of the US, and works well

The 1-3 minutes was what rachio originaly calculated when I set it up a EU location. Of course I changed it to settings I used on the conventional controller (20-50 minutes).

We I re-configured schedules using a US/CDN location, Rachio calculated times 20-30 minutes. Which looked reasonble to me.

What I don’t understand is the soil moisture level (in zone screen) and the moisture balance (shown in the zone graph screen. Looking to the moisture balance it looks to me if this represents the moisture “level” .
What is the difference between these 2 parameters?

Grtz

The moisture level goes from 110% (when raining or just before it rains) down to 0%. Zero % is when your moisture hits the allowed depletion rate (of 50% or whatever it’s set for in the Advanced Settings)

Obviously, from the table, you start each day with the previous moisture balance, add any rain and watering, deduct the evaporation, to finally leave the current moisture balance.

What I have seen is that the numbers are recalculated every 12 hours. So during rain, or moreso just before it rains, the system changes zones to 110% until the next 12hr point when it then uses what rain ACTUALLY fell, to reset it’s numbers.

Again, the evaporation is initially forecasted but at 12hr intervals, it then calculates it based on the actual temperatures from the PWS.

So is the PWS far away from you ? Do the temperature and rainfall figures look correct ?

Here’s mine for the past few days. I water with 12mins @ 3.8cm/h so you can see how much it adds. Our daytime temps are well in the mid 20’s each day

The only bit I do not understand is why it forecasts my filling at 1.13 when I expect it to fill with only 0.75