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New 👋 North Florida Watering Suggestion

Schedules & Zones Flex Monthly
#1

Good afternoon, and I’m new here! I just successfully installed my Rachio unit, configured, zones set up and set my Flex Monthly schedule! My first watering will occur on Monday (asked it to skip Sunday due to egg hunting tomorrow) but a bit of a head scratcher on the Watering Duration the app used by default. I live in North Florida, the Jacksonville area, with Saint Augustine grass. With my previous controller, my two main zones were set to 45 minutes each. That might have been a bit excessive. I know that some of my grass doesn’t have deep roots where we’ve pulled up a runner and seen how short they are so looking to set the Rachio better than before.

The default setting was to run those zones for 13 minutes now but I feel I should bump those up right away. Or should I leave it like that and see what happens before bumping it up. Was thinking of doing a can test which I’ve not done before. I’ve seen some neighbors with a lot more water flow come out of their heads then I see from mine.

1 Like
#2

Definitely do a catch can test to dial in your precipitation/nozzle rate in advanced zone settings. Could be the default rate is much higher than your actual output. A great first step to calibrating the Rachio to your yard.

#3

I live in Jacksonville as well and upgraded from rainbird controller to Rachio 3 yesterday. I was watering 20,35,35,20 on my zones wed and sat with jea. Rachio adjusted it to 16,36,23,8 to account for shaded zones. If I remember I’ll report back.

#4

Nice to meet you Cameron, and fellow Jaxer. My four default zone times were 13,8,13,13 so I’m thinking of doubling each of those for this first watering tomorrow when I put the cans out. Funny that we were both installing Rachio’s on the same day.

#5

Cameron, thought I’d check in and see if you were experiencing the same thing here in North Florida that I was.

The Flex Monthly schedule wants to water the yard every day for the months of May, June, July and August if every day is selected as a possible water day. I just happened to start in April which is in the months of September to April that it does the every 2 or 3 days random mix. If I turn days off then it does all days but that or those days. If I adjust water times up or down it still does all the days. Seems its preference is to do short waterings everyday.

#6

Hey, I’m actually doing fixed wed and Saturday due to JEA and running as needed on mondays if we are in a drought. I’ve also tweaked our zone advanced settings. I bought https://www.sprinklerwarehouse.com/hydro-rain-audit-catch-cup-hrp-200-ml

And followed the directions to get the correct nozzle inches per hour and efficiency. It works!

#7

I ordered those catch cups yesterday and I’ve been wanting to get those amounts to dial that in, thanks for the link, prefer this to empty tuna cans.

Assuming you have St. Augustine grass? Using th WWS soil survey site, I’m like all sand soil here in the Miramar area. I have like no water capacity here which is a .06

On one hand I want my roots to go deeper but when I don’t soak it I have a lot of areas that blades close up and start turning different greens and yellows. Cups or going to help understand if I have areas in each zone that aren’t getting enough. Last month with the rains it was all looking great and growing great! So far this month not so good looking.

#8

We have st Augustine and it’s looking horrible. I didn’t trust the survey so I did this https://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheet/soil-texture-analysis-the-jar-test/

Turns out we have loamy sand

#9

Yep, the soil jar test is a great idea. Soil can even vary in different parts of the yard (my front yard has much better soil, backyard is really sandy).

#10

Very cool, I’ve not heard of this kind of test but looks easy enough. Had noticed on the WWS soil site that it doesn’t have any decent zoomed in accuracy, more of an average of 100s of acres.

#11

Plus builders can bring in soil from elsewhere, or homeowners could have someone put better soil in as part of re-sodding, etc…