I’ve had a Rachio for a few years now and it’s worked fine. I set my soil type based on the map service in the how to/KBs I’ve found on this site. All has been okay up until this year. Grass has been pretty crunchy this summer. Not completely dead, but definitely not green. I’m outside Philly, PA and we’ve had NO rain this summer.
I mostly blamed it on me knowing I never set some of the more advanced settings and not doing a test with catch cans. So I did that finally a week or two ago. Now I may have swung in the complete opposite direction. In the past, the front lawn (Where I’m concentrating right now) would get watered once a week at best for about 30 minutes per zone (Two zones, lawn is pretty much a rectangular box.)
Today I heard the sprinklers click on around midnight and thought, that’s odd. It was going to run each zone in the front yard for 1.5 hours! And then do it again a week later. There’s no way my yard is going to absorb that kind of water!
These are rotary head nozzles, loam soil, lots of shade and moderate slope. The schedule is a flex daily and is allowed to run every day. Smart cycle is on.
I set the efficiency (60% & 78% for the two zones) and nozzle inches per hour (.34) after doing my catch can test with the orbit catch cans and used their site to crunch the numbers.
Is once a week with that amount of water correct (Roughly)?
With .34"/hr (that is pretty low for even rotary nozzles), 1.5 hours seems right to me. My Hunter MP’s put down about .58"/hr and my zones run for right at about an hour each time.
Think about it, .34"/hr, you are only putting down .5" of water once a week. In most cases, grass needs at least 1-1.5" per week to stay lush (more in hotter climates). Without supplemental watering from mother nature, you are actually putting down a reasonable amount of water right now…if it was truly working well at 30 minutes prior (no changes to sprinkler nozzles), you could fool with the settings to make it water that much, but again, it doesn’t seem abundant to me.
The 1.5 hours doesn’t concern me in the sense of water usage - it’s more I feel like that’s a lot of water at one time. Is that really getting absorbed? I would need to wake up when that cycle completes and see if I have puddles or what have you. Would seem to make sense that it would run for 30 minutes three times a week or something. No?
You are only putting down .34"/hr. That is NOTHING. For your whole runtime you aren’t even putting down 1" of water, which should be able to soak in without issue, unless you have some ridiculously hard packed soil. I think concrete could soak up .34"/hr.
But check it out. If you are seeing puddling or pooling, then you can possibly make asjustments…