I’ve been using my Rachio 3 for nearly 2 years now with flex daily. After the initial setup, it ran fine, then last summer I saw some brown spots so was trying to tweak the advanced settings. Ever since then, one of my 3 backyard grass zones, “Backyard Mid” always runs for 4 minutes, while the other two zones do 12 minutes, soak, 12 minutes. So there is a huge difference here, but I don’t see any difference in the zone settings. I’ve tried resetting the advanced screen settings, but that zone still only runs for 4 minutes.
Double checking just now, there are slight differences - root depth of 5.9 vs 6 inches, and the efficiency setting was slightly lower. But these don’t explain a 6-fold difference in watering times.
Have you tried re-creating the Flex Daily schedule? It is possible the watering duration for your Backyard Mid was accidentally modified/overriden to 4 minutes. That’s all I can think of. You’re right, they should have similar watering durations.
What is your nozzle PR on each of those zones? For the sake of troubleshooting, get the root depth and efficiency to match.
Also, in the schedule itself, you can select the duration section (where it shows total duration for that schedule) and manually adjust the times for each zone. Is there a chance that you manually pulled back (or increased) a zone?
They’re both at 1.5"/hour.
However, you are correct about the schedule. It shows “4 minutes” for the zone in question. How does this interact with the flex schedule? I thought the whole point of flex scheduling is that it manages the watering times for me. I increased it to match the other zones.
I’m pretty sure this started when I disabled the zone for a kids bounce house last year, then reenabled it. I was expecting it to retain all the same settings, but looks like I was wrong.
I’ve seen lots of folks accidentally adjust the watering duration and that overrides automatic management of watering duration. You should recreate your Flex Daily schedule and see if that resolves your issue.
Flex does manage duration and frequency, but also gives you the ability to adjust run times if you feel you are smarter than Rachio I guess. I don’t think there is really anyway for this to magically happen on its own, so is there a chance you raised the other two zones last year when things were dry, or accidentally lowered the one in question? If you aren’t 100% sure what is the “correct” duration, delete the schedule and recreate it.
Thanks. I will recreate the flex daily schedule. It would have saved me a lot of trouble if the UI indicated there was a manual override on a given zone.
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