I have found that when the Rachio sees rain in the forecast, it often chooses not to water. Okay that’s fine if it actually rains at my house, but 80% of the time rain is in the forecast, I get zero rain. My observation is that the Rachio then chooses to not water (or to delay schedules) somehow thinking I got rain. I’d like to see an option to get a notification when the system decides to delay watering. The notification would appear when the Rachio has assumed I got rain. The notification would say “Did you receive measurable rain at this location?” Next to that would be a yes/no button. If I say no the Rachio then knows absolutely that no rain fell at this location and will not delay schedules. If I say yes, the Rachio could even then ask me how much rain fell and then make appropriate adjustments.
This feature would be normally off and would have to be turned on by the Rachio user. This would help me keep plants alive during the long, stupid hot summers here in Austin. I have had issues expecting the system to water, only to find it didn’t. The only reason I can see for this to happen is that there was a chance of rain and the system made a wrong decision. When it’s 100º plus outside, missing a water schedule can really hurt plants.
Hello @WelshDog, this is Drew from the product team. I’m very interested in both your problem and your suggestion! We are aware that rain skips sometimes don’t serve customers well in the southwest in summer, where rain is typically convective and hard to forecast. We’re trying to find a way to improve the feature that will work for everyone. Your suggestion is pretty intriguing. It is close to what we offer with the “cancel skip” option on rain skip events in the event feed. I wonder if you are seeing those, and if so, why that system is not solving your problem.
I assume you are receiving rain skip push notifications. Obviously these happen well before the schedule watering so we won’t know if enough rain has fallen, so a skip button here would not be useful (unless you think so). I’m guessing that cancelling a skip from the event feed also doesn’t solve your problem for the same reason: it’s only available before the watering time, and you really want to evaluate whether the skip was warranted after the time has passed and we know in real life if it rained or not.
Your suggestion is something like a follow-up notification that would appear after the scheduled watering time (in this case, no watering because it was skipped) that asks if you’d like to in effect cancel the skip and run the watering anyway (in most cases, because it didn’t rain/ rain enough). Would something like this solve your problem? Would you want to see the notification right after the scheduled watering window had finished, or some delay after (say, 1 hour).
