How to schedule drips that are covered (never receive rain)

I have a set of plants on drips that will never receive rain due to an overhead covering. Yet I would like to use whatever can be available regarding the weather to track/compute/predict ET and adjust scheduling dynamically. Mostly this would be a slow variation throughout the year, with a more “hyper-local” correction based on observed temperatures.
At first I though daily Flex, and it was obvious to me that I should de-activate “rain skip”, but it still seems to take into account predicted rain and not schedule watering for too long.
I can obviously do “Fixed”, but that mostly defeats the purpose of the Rachio (for that zone at least).

Basically I want to be as “flex” as possible, but ignoring both forecasted and observed rain as contributing to the soil moisture.

If they are covered from rain, I can only assume that they are covered from direct sunlight as well. I think that is going to be hard to accomplish since the calculations are going to be based on ET, which includes sunlight… :thinking:

They are covered from rain because of a small overhanging eve, and further a patio cover made out of a semi transparent and diffusing material. So yes, they never get rained on, and, technically, no direct sunlight (its “filtered” by the cover), but they get plenty of light and are also subject to the outside temperatures. There is plenty material there to compute an ET and use that for watering purposes (perhaps after some fine tuning of the advanced parameters), but still need there to be no reaction for forecasted, or observed (private weather station) rain.

It’s actually quite an oversight. I run more orbit bhyves and they have a provision for rainfall, drought and are easier to configure overall. It’s not uncommon to have planters under an eve on apartment buildings. I’ve got several.

I don´t know if i got your problem right: Have you considered a smart home with an automation? I am using Ecowitt soil sendors, Homey and an old Rachio model.If soil moisture drops down under 30% Rachios API will receive a command for 40 min irrigation.

Feel free to contact me if you need any further information

Yes. I am currently running home assistant and I have soil sensors. So I can go there but it kind of defeats the purpose of getting g a Rachio. So I was exploring this first.

Ah OK, that seems to be the construct I am using (I´m from Europe). I am using the flex daily schedule from the Rachio Interface and the flow in the Homey (in your case home assistant) is just the backup solution. It activates the rachio valve for a certain time if the soil is to dry and Rachios algorithm does not irrigate contrary to expectations automatically. Happens in very rare cases. Lucky with that solution.
Excuse me for the case I did not understand the problem properly. Feel free to re-ask if you want.
KR
Felix