New user here. I have the Rachio 3 8-zone. I totally agree with the over complexity of the controller. When I had my system installed, the irrigation guy put in a dumb old tech Hunter controller. I upgraded to the Rachio 3 b/c a co-worker has a Rachio 2 and he said he loved it. I wanted a controller where I could set it and forget it. I put up with the setup of each zone, tried to best guess as I could. Then I set the controller on Flex Monthly and continued with my life. This summer 2020 my lawn was kind of brown but I had my irrigation running. Rachio watered my lawn every 5 days, running for 3+ hours for all 5 zones at a time. I didn’t think much about it b/c I bought this controller so I don’t have to think. Then recently when I extracted soil for a soil test using a soil extractor, I realized my soil was too dry!!! So I started to play around with the settings. The more I read the more those settings made sense. Instead of 1 single schedule, I created 2 to cover different zones and have them run on different days. The schedules are still flex monthly. With the adjustments, the lawn is now watered more deeply but the frequency is still every 5 days. I think that is too long so I have been trying to adjust the various settings to see if I could get it to water every 3 days. With my setting now the schedules run every other day. I have not had any success in having it run every 3 days. Take for example, the Crop Coefficient. I have it at 80% (cool season grass). Then keeping everything else the same, I lower it to 79. Schedules are still at every other day. Then 78. No change. Then 77. Suddenly the schedules switch to every 5 days! What the heck! Playing with other settings with small increments like that also produce big jump in frequency. I have spent hours on this and got very frustrated. Wish it would be simple as telling Rachio every so often “Hey my grass seems to turn brown” and let it adjust the parameters to get more water down until it could find a setting that works. I rather go extract the soil and let it know that how dry my soil is versus adjusting all these crazy parameters.
