New to Rachio, Watering times are very high

Hi I just bought a Rachio Gen 1 16 zone control unit. I installed it over the weekend and everything went smoothly. Set up my zones in the app. Basically have 9 zone. 6 are grass (summer one I think), 3 are drips.

I live in northern California. Roseville, 95661 Zip Code.

Previously I was watering 9-10 minutes all zones, and every other day (i think 3 or 4 times a week; forget if it was odd or even) Most plants and grass did well with this. (grass suffered in extereme summer, but we had watering restrictions last year)

Now the Rachio recommends I water each grass zone 23 minutes and each drip area 45-56 mins. It is watering 2-3x/week right now. This seems excessively high to me. Did I do something wrong or this is typical behavior for the system.

I thought less time and more episodes of watering were better than watering a whole bunch in one sitting.

Any Feedback will be appreciated.

In terms of the zone soil setting etc, almost everything is default. Just changes types of plants for each zone and type of watering system.

I’m not a botanist, but the premise is longer, less frequent watering promotes deeper root growth and drought tolerance, which results ultimately in less water used.

@rsmomi You should take a look at the settings in more detail, rather than just using the defaults. A few of those settings can make a world of difference. The Rachio guys have some nice documentation at http://support.rachio.com/category/495-zone-setup.

I created custom nozzles after I measured area and GPM for each zone. Then assigned those nozzles to respective zones. That made Rachio come out with better durations than the one that it provided with the defaults.

Please check Precipitation rate given gallons per hour data for a zone.

Actually that does not seem too bad in my opinion. I’ll assume you are on flex?

I don’t know your plants so,you have to make that call on how long.

For your turf, longer less frequent is much better.

On a flex for me, I go 17-30 minutes but once every 9-10 days, for,now, that will increase to every 4 days in August.

What type of heads do you have? Let’s see if the config is correct.

On[quote=“rsmomi, post:1, topic:3638”]
I thought less time and more episodes of watering were better than watering a whole bunch in one sitting.
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For some plants this is the case, but almost all grass is the opposite.

@rsmomi If you are using As Needed schedules and it’s all one, you should split the grass and drip into two separate schedules. We’re working to make this clear/automatic in the future. Sorry for the confusion if this is the case.

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