Hi - I’ve kind of run into a snag the last week or two. Over the course of the last few days, watering schedules were skipped because of predicted precipitation. I have a few zones that run everyday and all zones run every other day. For the last three days, none of the zones were run b/c of the predicted precipitation. The problem however was that it never actually rained and nothing in effect was watered for the last 3 days.
Do the scheduling algorithms actually take “actual precipitation” into account when choosing whether to skip cycles? It seems to me that they skip cycles based on “predicted precipitation” but don’t actually account for prior precipitation if multiple days were skipped.
I can’t answer your issue but I have a similar issue. I think the rachio system only updates nightly (weather intelligence) around midnight with new weather data. I plan my fertilizer and soil treatments around my rachio watering schedule to try and save money by making applications the evening before scheduled watering. However, numerous times I have had rachio update at night after I’ve gone to bed and decide to water when previously no water was scheduled. I then have to waste water by running my zones again to “water in” my lawn treatments. I’ve also observed my “calendar” and the soil moisture graph under each zone dont sync. The calendar will show no watering scheduled but when I access a zone and look at the daily soil moisture graph it will show irrigation is scheduled. Last night, rachio was not scheduled to water because of anticipated rain, I’m in east texas and hurricane Laura is passing through. Well, I didn’t get rain yesterday, Thursday, so again about midnight, Rachio updated and decided my lawn needed water. At 1:38 am it put down a half inch, 43 minutes per zone, on 6 zones. Guess what, at the same time we got 1/3 of an inch of rain. I know because I have a personal weather station 25 feet from my rachio controller. I would have thought the rachio would pause/stop/postpone the run to save me water. It is supposed to be smart and help conserve water. I now doubt that. I am learning the only “smart” about Rachio is that it is a wireless wifi app controlled system. When it comes to monitoring rain, weather, and conserving water it is not so smart. It obviously does not have real time data availability and different screens within the app dont sync with each other. I wonder if a traditional controller with a rain gauge would gave paused the watering cycle while it recorded rain? I am almost to the point of not recommending Rachio. I have/had loved the Rachio the past year, but as time goes on I am losing confidence in its smart ability. I’ll probably just manually control it in the future as it obviously cant keep up with our Texas popup rain patterns.
Interesting. I have my schedule as Flex Daily. Rachio scheduled a watering yesterday morning but canceled it because of the “anticipated” thunderstorm yesterday during the day. Yesterday went and gone w/o any rain and Rachio didn’t schedule a make-up watering session for that canceled session. Today it is forecast to rain again but we’ll see. However I just looked at the scheduled and saw Rachio schedule a session for tomorrow morning. So it looks like Rachio is trying to adapt but getting confused because of the infrequent updates it gets to make decisions. So if you have Flex Daily, it will be hard trying to coordinate your other activities with the watering session because what you see is not what you’re going to get.
