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
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
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?
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
