No no no (why are my flex zones 110% moisture?)

All zones showing 110% saturation. ALL 7. No no no. C’mon guys!!

Huge fluctuations without any rain or watering. Was like 15% yesterday.

Houston. We got problems. Somebody tinkering too much?

Hmm, checked both of my controllers and all is good on my end…

@Dwiniger - post a picture of the soil moisture with more details for a zone.

I’ve had about 3" of rain over the last several days, so mine was correctly at 110% last night.

@Dwiniger - go into one of the zones, and click on Soil Moisture, then more details and a screen like this should show up:

Just curious to see the detail behind the percentage.

1 Like

From the pics of your zones, you have an very awesome place! All of my zones are OK too. Hopefully the detail behind one of your zones will help figure this out quickly.

1 Like

@Dwiniger observed/forecasted precipitation pushed you to 110%.

:cheers:

WHY not base saturation on actuals rather projections?

@Dwiniger - that is one of the powerful features (IMHO) of Rachio. Rachio won’t water when it thinks rain will be coming within 24 hours. Once the forecast becomes reality, Rachio will update the zone details with what actually happened (e.g. more or less).

2 Likes

Then the word Projected should be added to the saturation %.

Would explain everything.

A post was split to a new topic: Flex daily moisture levels not correct

I wonder about this too. With our monsoons and the extreme microclimate activity I wonder if using predicted rain can do more harm than good. Let’s say I was be due to water on Monday if there was no predicted or actual rain. Then I get predicted rain on Monday and each day of 5 the consecutive days afterward, and no rain actually falls on any of those days, which day of the week will my irrigation kick in? It’s a very real scenario in Phoenix this time of year.

1 Like

Same for Texas. :smile: There may be a 50% chance of rain in the region but the chance that it’ll actually rain in any one spot is far less. Most rain events this time of year are very scattered and sporadic. We had rain last week, first time in over three weeks. Our community Facebook page ad people posting rain gauge totals ranging from 1.5" all the way up to 3.5", all valid and all within one relatively small town.
In the northern midwest it seemed to rain over larger areas so the predictions were more reliable for a larger area.

@helosix @azdavidr It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t problem. My favorite. Once your zone is fully depleted to 0% the hope is forecasted precip isn’t greater than your depth of water (bucket fill value) so we irrigate that day. We take precip intensity and percent of probability (POP, probability of rain) and multiply to get the forecasted precip. If POP is < 80% we multiply by precip intensity, if POP > 80% we take at face value (i.e. 100%).

.5 precip intensity, POP 50% = .25 precip forecast
.5 precip intensity, POP 85% = .5 precip forecast

For all of the variables we have to factor in, I think this method is fairly conservative, but clearly in different areas of the country works better than others.

If POP and precip intensity are always larger than your depth of water we won’t water. I’d say in those cases your depth of water might be too low since it’s hard to believe we would have forecasting > .4+ inches of precipitation every day. :confused:

:cheers:

2 Likes

Thanks for the explanation. It sounds like although unlikely, there a chance that predictions could have kept my lawn from getting irrigated all 5 days of my example?

Is there an option to turn off the use of predictions for a given zone? I just don’t think the advantage is worth the potential savings in our particular climate, whereas the risk is significant due to our extreme weather. I could see it working great in many areas, so it’s a nice option to have available in those places.

Next time you experience this behavior I’d like to see the moisture graph, curious what the values are.

Not at the moment.

:cheers:

It was a hypothetical. I’ll let you know if anything comes up, but I’d honestly rather not monitor it that closely these days. When was use of predicted data introduced?

FWIW I’d like to see the option to disable it in a future release. I know there can be interdependecies that might make it more complex than it seems, but hopefully that’s not the case. I have some vegetation that didn’t fare as well this summer as last summer, and I wonder if this was a factor.

I must have not worded this very well, or perhaps my suggestions were not well received by the community, but I have the same problem here in Charlotte. So far the most I have seen is 3 days with the moisture level at 0% without watering. I’ve never let it go further because I do a manual watering to keep the plants from dying. I don’t care quite as much with my grass as it can go dormant, but I really care with the rest of my landscaping.

See Need a way to handle precipitation that doesn't happen for Flex Daily

2 Likes

@Linn - and @azdavidr - same here all four of my zones are at zero moisture from last night and no watering today I don’t know if it’s because flex daily is forecasting rain :cloud_with_rain: for tonight or I don’t know what’s going on I even get an error when trying to load moisture data on my iPad.

My shrub zone reports 0% and I also can’t see my graphs.

This is really concerning to me. I pushed my tree and shrub zones to where they can’t afford not being watered when they get depleted . I’m becoming more certain this is the reason I’ve lost some shrubs that have been fine for two years on Flex.

Sorry @Linn, I just plain missed this. I agree with you 100%.

Again, when was the use of predicted rain introduced?