Newbe, What did I do wrong?

Schedules & Zones
1

One of drip zones is scheduled as Fixed Schedule, daily, total of 6 minutes, Start At 10:00 AM, Cycle & Soak (1 min, Soak 60 min), Clay soil. Today, it ran for 6 minutes straight, no soak interval. What did I miss please?

NoSoak_2021-04-02_13-05-21
NoSoak_2021-04-02_13-05-21797×1307 59.5 KB

2

Because drip is a slow watering method where runoff is typically not a problem, cycle and soak won’t be applied. For a 6 minute watering duration, cycle and soak is almost certainly not necessary even if flow rates are high.

Here’s more information on cycle and soak straight from Rachio’s support pages:
https://support.rachio.com/en_us/smart-cycle-and-manual-cycle-and-soak-features-r1_FwL1Kw

If you must have cycle and soak, change the nozzle type to Fixed Sprayer and then adjust the inches/hour in Advanced Zone settings back to what it was for your drip system. Also increase the advanced zone efficiency setting back to 90%.

More on advanced zone settings:
https://support.rachio.com/en_us/what-are-advanced-zone-settings-Byh9v81Fv

3

Thanks much for the feedback. Helps greatly. I have adjusted according to your suggestions. I also appreciate the links to the additional documentation. I had seen the Advanced settings page, but not the one on Cycle & Soak. I am waiting on my catch cup delivery to set up the Advanced settings for all my zones, and in the mean time I had left the defaults. Now that I know about the Cycle & Soak tables, I have a better idea what to tweak to get things the way I want them. In that regard, it looks like the slope would also influence the algorithms to move to Cycle & Soak with lower watering times?

and then adjust the inches/hour in Advanced Zone

I have assumed you were talking about the “Nozzle” inches per hour, not Available Water.

Thanks again
Gary

4

Exactly. Slope is a factor if you’re letting Rachio automatically decide cycle and soak. I believe it won’t be considered for manual cycle and soak. Glad I could be of some help!

5

I learned something new a few weeks ago concerning “cycle and soak”. I knew that cycle and soak was comment for when one would have run off . . . usually when slope and/or high amounts of clay. However, while talking to my sod company, they suggested using cycle and soak for me with high amount of sand to prevent what I will call “run through”. I am not sure what Rachio uses to decide whether to do cycle & soak.