I just picked up a new 8 zone 2nd get unit and outside housing.
Since it was raining all day and my unit is outside (Hunter Pro C), I decided to RTFM and setup the unit and zones before wiring it up.
All went smooth, setup zones, soil, heads…ect, even went in and adjusted the sq feet of the zones.
Question are around the scheduling and run time.
I choose the WAN, whats the point of the upgrade if I am just using a schedule
It told me that it would water for over 3 hours basically twice a week, so 6 hours total weekly.
Even in the middle of the summer my Hunter would only run 1 hour a day, so it would take watering 6 days to total my spring setting the Rachio is suggesting.
Also, it says it wants to water tomorrow…it rained like 7 hours today. I might ignore this since it has not “learned” my schedule and settings, but my Hunter is already turned off due to the rain sensor.
I am 10 miles outside of Boston incase you want to know my location.
As for the skipping tomorrow because of rain today or the next day, the controller will skip a schedule if there has or will be rain beyond the threshold you’ve set at a decision time about an hour prior to the scheduled run. I can’t answer the rest. I’m new here too.
once the percip data comes in for your weather station, it should update correctly, this can lag a bit at times.
So, wan is tricky, I don’t like it and went back to flex, but first, in wan if any zone needs to water all zones will water…make sure you split your WANs into similar crop/sun (another reason i went back to flex).
Second, depending on where you looked for the times, in certain views you will see a soak time, don’t include that in the watering time.
Third, I would hook up your rain sensor to the rachio.
Fourth, I’ll,agree 6 hours seems like some turf drowning recipe, but do you know how much water your landscaping needs? The honest number usually surprises ppl, which is why I ask.
I figured the weather data would need to play catchup.
I read that flex is on it’s way out so I did’t want to do that, figured going with the new WAN.
Soak times are not included in the 3+ hours of watering.
I have 3 schedules, flowerbed, front lawn and back lawn.
flowerbed 35 minutes It’s 200 sq feet with 4 fixed spray. Zone 1
front lawn 50 minutes it’s 1500 sq feet with 2 zones rotary 30 min and fixed 20 Z2, 3
Backyard 100 minutes it’s 5000 sq feet with 4 zones, 20(f), 20(f), 30®, 30® Z4-7
My usual for this time of year would be 2 days a week
Z1 8 min
2 14 min
3 6 min
4 6 min
5 6 min
6 14 min
7 10 min
I will hook up the rain sensor once I get it wired up. I will try a few catch cans to check, but yard always looked good. Summer I would up the # of days and bump up the rotary times.
I can’t go back to wan, it’s not there. I’ll ride this horse all the way to its firey grave!
I’m assuming your turf is fescue or Kentucky, someone with more experience with cool season should comment, but the only thing that alarms me is your frequency. That amount of time 2x a week, seems like a lot.
So hopefully zone 1 is on its own schedule, zone 2-7 could be on the same schedule as long as their sun exposure is the same, else your full sun zone is going to drag your partial zone into a watering.
My experiment with wan is that it is too aggressive, I would love to see what a flex schedule looks like, flex is a hell of a model.
Also, with flex, I know when properly tuned, you would not need to make the adjustments in the summer. Wan also provides this panacea, but it still needs a few tweaks.
Increasing the amount of time you water a zone in the summer is a farce. You should be soaking your soil column so increasing the runtime should result in runoff or unavailable water.
It seems to me that you’ve been doing your research on setup, but just in case you’re like me (I’m fairly new as well) and skipped a few steps initially, be sure to go through them all. For example, did you pick the appropriate vegetation type, nozzles and root zone depth ? I used the defaults for a few of them and they had a pretty significant impact on my run time and durations. Once I dialed them in I was much closer to what seemed like a reasonable schedule.
FYI, I also noticed that when I made adjustments initial duration and run times displayed were a bit wacky. After about 15 minutes I saw the ‘real’ numbers.
6" seems fair for established turf, but those run times sound crazy long compared to what I have. Here in AZ we have Bermuda for summer grass. Here’s my setup for what it’s worth:
I’m just getting started on Rachio however, so I’m watching my grass to see how it does and may end up needing to adjust. Our landscaper recommends three 12 minute run times three times a week at the peak of summer, but I think they have a tendency to overwater.
10" sounds a bit deep for a flower bed. I believe the ‘annual’ vegetation setting defaults to 4" ? That’s what I currently have set.
I have soaker tubes in my vegetable garden so I set up a custom nozzle. The key setting there is precipitation rate, which I set to 0.4 in/hr. You might look in the app. to see what your in/hr settings are to see if they are reasonable. Here’s my garden setup.
It waters at about 50 minute run times, but those soaker hoses bleed out water at a pretty slow rate. After watering I’ve been checking the moisture levels of the soil and it seems decent.
If you haven’t already, go to the zone settings and take a look at the moisture graphs. They are informative with Flex as to when it’s getting water, and what the assumed depletion is. If it’s out of whack due to experimenting with settings, etc., you can hit the adjust and empty the zone out.
That actually doesn’t seem like a lot to get a proper deep watering for turf (duration wise), not knowing every detail… If you are on flex, I highly doubt that will run more than 2x a week at peak heat.
Don’t tweak the setting to back into a specific watering duratio unless you are dealing with a drip zone.
Keep the settings honest, the models have a lot of academic research behind them. Wan might go too frequent, that was my experience but you are just a few more tweaks from a flex schedule. The robotic overlords will pop a bottle of bubbly…pick a zone, post all the details in the flex forum and we will,set up a schedule for that one zone and compare/contrast.