Is saturation skip broken?

byancey · June 2, 2026, 3:13pm

Based on Rachio’s FAQ, my understanding is that saturation skip should use estimated moisture levels to determine whether the lawn can make it to the next scheduled watering with some moisture still remaining. The moisture estimates are visible to us, but the calculation used to decide whether to skip watering is not.

I’m using a fixed schedule with all Smart Features enabled, including Saturation Skip. Watering days are Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, so there are no long gaps between waterings. Forecast and actual temperatures during this period have averaged in the mid-to-high 70s, so extreme evaporation shouldn’t have been a factor.

For the past several weeks, Rachio has watered every zone in my front lawn at every opportunity even though the moisture estimates on all zones have consistently been between 80% and 110%. The 110% readings occurred on two occasions where Rachio chose to water even though the estimates were already at 98% before watering.

Actual readings from a handheld moisture meter have never dropped below 10/10 during this period, and on one occasion when the estimate dropped to 65% while measured moisture still registered 10/10, I used the zones Fill feature to manually bump it back to 100%. It didn’t matter—Rachio still watered the next morning.

On two occasions in the last week, I’ve gone to bed with a Weather Skip for the schedule active, only to wake up and find that Rachio changed its mind at 4:00 a.m. while I slept, and ran a full watering cycle on an already saturated lawn. I’m not a fan of Rachio telling me it’s going to skip if it hasn’t actually committed to the skip, but aside from that I would have expected the saturation skip to have kicked in.

The only actual skip I’ve managed was when I finally threw up my hands and issued a User Skip myself. Fortunately that worked, but if I have to manage the watering manually, what’s the point of a smart controller?

Does this sound like normal behavior for a fixed schedule with saturation skip enabled, or is something else wrong here? I would appreciate any insight for how to address this. For now I’m just going to manually skip every watering until my handheld moisture meter tells me otherwise.

JBTexas · June 2, 2026, 5:54pm

You’re watering at every opportunity because you’ve got a fixed schedule and you’re not encountering any conditions be which those sessions should be skipped. Then you trash the idea of a Rachio being able to help you. Have you read about or tried Flex schedules (monthly from historical experience, daily from current weather circumstances)? You’re certainly able, if you wish, to water your lawn beyond anything required by your vegetation, but you should consider letting the controller make the decisions about how much, how often.

byancey · June 3, 2026, 3:52am

Then you trash the idea of a Rachio being able to help you.

I was frustrated when I posted my questions this morning, and clearly some of that came through in my post, but it was certainly not my intent to “trash the idea of Rachio being able to help.” To the contrary, I came here because I was hoping Rachio, or someone in this community with more Rachio experience than I have, could address my frustrations and help me better understand saturation skip. I still hope that will be the case.

Have you read about or tried Flex schedules (monthly from historical experience, daily from current weather circumstances)? You’re certainly able, if you wish, to water your lawn beyond anything required by your vegetation, but you should consider letting the controller make the decisions about how much, how often.

Yes, I have used the Flex schedules. In fact, I ran all of my zones on Flex Daily for the first six weeks after installing the Rachio.

Long story short, we had an extremely dry winter here in Colorado, and while Flex Daily may have been fine in a normal season, my lawn needed more early-season water this year than Rachio was putting down. I switched to a fixed schedule so that I could have more control over the actual frequency and length of the watering.

I do intend to switch back to Flex Daily at some point, but while I’m using a fixed schedule, I’d still like to understand what’s going on with Saturation Skip.

You’re watering at every opportunity because you’ve got a fixed schedule and you’re not encountering any conditions by which those sessions should be skipped.

I understand that a fixed schedule will water unless a skip condition is met. My question is which Saturation Skip condition is not being met here.

Based on my reading of Rachio’s FAQ, Saturation Skip should skip a scheduled watering when the estimated soil moisture is sufficient to make it to the next scheduled watering. In my case, Rachio’s own moisture estimates have consistently been above or very close to 100%, the next watering opportunity is only 24 to 48 hours away, and the forecast temperatures have been moderate—yet it continues to water at every opportunity.

If those conditions are not enough to trigger Saturation Skip, I’d like to understand what would be. Am I missing some detail about how Saturation Skip works on fixed schedules, or is there something I should troubleshoot in my setup? Could this be a software, app, or configuration issue, and if so, is there anything I should try to reset or correct it?

JBTexas · June 3, 2026, 4:05pm

I’d strongly suggest you read Weather Intelligence™ entry here in the Support pages. Several things of note that I learned just today:

Saturation skips are automatic in Flex daily schedules - next watering is just pushed forward if necessary.
A saturation skip for a fixed or a flex monthly schedule is off by default and must be explicitly enabled by schedule.
For a saturation skip to be invoked for a schedule, all the zones in that schedule must meet the skip criteria. If just one zone does not, there will be no skip.
The saturation skip criteria is computed from a look-back of 7 days and a look-forward 7 days of actual and forecast water indicating a high likelihood that the zone, if skipped, already has or will have enough water available until the next scheduled irrigation.
Saturation skips can be sensitive to your method of determining whether and how much rain fell at your location. If you are in your own “micro climate” or have selected a weather station that is, there’s a good chance a skip calculation can be wrong at any time. Or, if you’re using aggregated data from a Weather Network or a station that aggregates data, their reporting of rainfall at your location is an estimate based on readings from many weather stations which may not represent weather circumstances over your lawn, and can deliver inappropriately “smoothed” measurements. You get to decide (which may be why the setting is optional and off by default) whether it’s reasonable to use.

If you’d tell us a bit more about how you’ve set up your zones (type, vegetation, root depth, allowed depletion, crop coefficient, efficiency, etc.), we might be able to tell you why Rachio feels it needs to water every day. Tell us how you measured your zones, or computed Nozzle inches per hour.

byancey · June 4, 2026, 4:57pm

Thanks for the detailed response @JBTexas

I think 1-3 are either not directly relevant to my setup, or are already understood well enough that they are not likely the reason for Saturation Skips not occurring when I would expect them. Items 4 and 5 are a bit more interesting and certainly could be at play here. I’ll read through the article you linked and consider those further.

Ironically, the original reason I moved from Flex Dailly to Fixed schedules a month back was over concern that Flex Daily was being too conservative during the early-season to account for a very dry winter here. Now I have the opposite problem. We’ve had a bit more natural precipitation in May, and that combined with pretty consistent scheduled watering with no saturation skips has left my front lawn consistently at a “measured” daily soil moisture reading of 10/10 for that last 3 weeks. There are still parts of my lawn that have not fully recovered and greened up…but it’s clearly not the result of insufficient moisture at this point. I think I might just try “filling all the tanks” on the zones and then revert back to a Flex Daily schedule and see how things go.