New Grass Seed. Want to water ever hour during the day. Every 3 hours at night

just found other thread with tip for manual cycle and soak. eg 3 mins cycle 57 mins soak and with a run time of 30 mins will give me 10 intervals from early morning

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I don’t understand why an hourly schedule doesn’t have the ability to specify both a start and end time. This isn’t rocket science. No one wants fungus from over watering during the evening.

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Agreed. This appears to be an issue since 2015. You can add a start time to hourly watering… or you can add an end time to hourly watering. But not both. I’ve been in the software industry for 25 years, this should be an easy update to make. In the PNW, our lawns get overrun with moss and you end up dethatching it to bare soil every 2-3 years and then replanting. The new seed needs to be kept moist with light hourly watering during dry days for the first 1-2 weeks. I bought the Rachio with this use in mind. I still love it and have recommended to others… but I’m not sure what the purpose is of having hourly watering without both start and stop settings. Yes, I can and have created 8 separate schedules to get this done, but this seems to be a really simple and easy fix from the Rachio side.

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Hi Franz,
As a founder, I’m curious why such a simple update still hasn’t been made since the initial feedback 5 years ago.

Good question, our product team prioritizes features, and depending on customer feedback, priorities, etc. that will determine when issues get delivered. I do agree, a start/end time on hourly schedules would be a nice addition, but that feature could involve firmware, mobile, server, testing, etc. When you bump that up against other priorities apparently it just hasn’t surfaced up.

:cheers:

Hi Franz,
Thank you for your VERY quick reply. Your point about feature prioritization is why I posted on the community forum. I originally emailed Rachio customer support and they recommended that I post on the community because if there were enough interest this would impact new feature roadmaps better than single requests to support. And lo and behold… there are a large number of community postings going back 5 years on this exact topic. I love the Rachio product and the fact that it even allows hourly programming is fantastic and unique. But it already allows programming a start time OR an end time… just not both. Having worked in software for the last 25 years, I understand the new feature and QA process. Allowing users to select both start AND end times would not require a lot of additional coding and would happen mostly at the UI level. I have been able to use a work around, by creating 8 different schedules, but it would be great to know that fix for a current flaw in basic feature usage is in the works… and that it won’t take another 5 years.

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Another +1 for this feature! Every fall, lots of users have questions about how to handle overseeding their lawn. If I recall correctly, I set mine up before the hourly schedule was implemented. I was happy when it came out, and then quickly realized I was still going to have to use my separate schedules for overseeding. Perhaps there is another solution for an overseeding schedule (I was taught long ago to tell the techies what the problem is, don’t offer the solution). But breaking my own rule, it seems that the hourly schedule with a start AND end time might be the simplest place for a solution to this.

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@mckynzee @Simonhill +1 :wink:

:cheers:

New seed schedules and fixing finish before sunrisee are great examples of quality of life updates I would personally rather see scratched off a white board of backlogged work before stuff like Thrive and more UI tweaks. :slightly_smiling_face: I bet many of us do overseeding which could benefit.

My $0.02 nobody asked for. :grin:

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I would also like to add my disappointment in the slowness of adding this feature. We just installed our system, planted our grass, and now we can’t make this “smart” app run the way it needs to during the day on regular intervals but stopping at night. Not a great first impression. It seems like such a simple fix.

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No it doesn’t Franz, could you expand on this more please?

It’s not pretty but here it is.

Start with a fixed daily schedule with a specified start time. Next use run time and manual cycle / soak to determine how long and how often the schedule will run.

For example. Start at 5 am. Manual cycle of 2 minutes with a soak of 4 hours. Lastly run time of 8 minutes. This lets you start at 5 am. Run for 2 minutes and wait four hours. This will run 4 times a day (total of 8 minutes).

Just want to express my disappointment that there’s no way to set a start and end time. Seems like such a basic feature that obviously many people here need.

Such scheduling can be done using a 3rd party cron-job. This is not as easy as something that could eventually be implemented natively, but for those who need it this thread may be helpful:

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Lodging my vote for this feature I too bought Rachio intending to use as timer for new grass. It’s just beyond belief this feature isn’t a top priority. Everyone re seeds don’t they? What are ppl asking for above this feature?

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Multiple fixed schedules…

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Agreed, this is a much needed feature. I too was just looking for a way to water every hour only during the heat of the day and can’t believe it’s not in the app. Seems like a pretty logical feature, and an easy fix to the app.

Feature: Water every hour, for x minutes, from 9a-7p. But currently, I can only choose the start OR stop time. So if I tell the app to water every hour, when does it stop? It just runs indefinitely? OR if I tell it to water every hour and stop at 7p, that doesn’t make sense because I haven’t input when to start.

Please fix/add this small but much needed feature. I’d much rather coding time go towards this than new features no one asked for, or paid stuff like Thrive which I won’t use, or newsletters sent to email.

Thanks Rachio team!

Rachio has a detailed explanation of how to do this in the overseeding help files. I use this schedule when I need to overseed.

This will run each zone for three minutes and then do a soak to finish out the 2.5 hour hold. Then water again for three minutes and so on. So it totals five times so from 9:30 am, 12:00, 2:30, 5:00, and 7:30 exactly and then waits until next morning. Two different ones can be setup if you want different watering times on day and night. Key is to understand how the cycle and soak works and then calculate your watering and soak times to get the intervals you want. But overall, it does exactly that although not as intuitive as it could be.

I am a gen1 user, who has recommended Rachio to countless people. I too am disappointed that this is not available. Each year at overseeding time, I check and this has not been resolved. I do not believe the cycle time method works when you have different time requirements for each zone based on the irrigation heads (for example, zone 1 - 8 minutes, zone 2 - 3 minutes, zone 3 - 3 minutes). At the very minimum, you should allow users to be able to duplicate an existing schedule so all the customization for that schedule remains and you only need to change the start time. That would make it much easier to setup 4-5 waterings during overseeding times.

Can you please help me understand what makes this schedule stop at the last interval and not continue through the night? (After the 5 runs)

Thank you