Questions and suggestions

  1. Add better mapping options for drip line zones. I ended up just overlapping the zone lines in areas where no watering takes place which seemed to work well enough but was not ideal.

  2. Add more nozzle options, at least for drip lines. I don’t use any nozzles on my drip lines. They’re just a main 1" line that branches 1/4" lines to each plant without any emitters, etc. Works great. However if you create a schedule and then map your zones, adding nozzle types where each plant is then it’ll adjust your schedule inaccurately. The advanced setup can be adjusted easy enough though which is nice. I tuned mine and the scheduling automatically adjusted to just about what I prefer to water.

  3. What is the purpose of Flex Daily and Flex Monthly? Any schedule I’ve tried creating with those options doesn’t make any sense. For example, my drip lines which water some trees and shrubs, both Flex options automatically set the watering time to once per month for 10 hours straight. That makes no sense. When I manually edit the duration and set to only water on certain days of that schedule, the schedule doesn’t run on those certain days but the duration adjusts to what I set. I ended up going back to Fixed scheduling. Maybe its just me, I’ve used a Rainmachine for the last 6 years and Fixed scheduling is more similar to that.

If you don’t use emitters… how does the water get to the plant? Is it just an open hose?

Flex Monthly is more like a FIxed schedule, but takes historical weather into account in order to adjust watering.

Flex Daily is intended to provide scientific watering to create strong, drought resistant plants. This generally means watering less often, but more deeply. The ides is that the plant roots grow down into the soil to a certain depth (dependent on the plant type). As long as there is moisture in that soil, the plants can use it to grow. Rachio uses information on the weather and the plant types to determine how fast the moisture in the soil runs out, and once it gets below a certain level, it fills it back up. For shrubs, the root depth is 18 inches. Online, the average seems to be 7-9 feet deep for trees, but some can be MUCH deeper. Therefore, when you are dealing with trees, you have a large amount of water that gets added to fill that zone, but then it takes a long time for the trees to use it.

This is the opposite of how most people water, which is to add a little water very often. Watering this way encourages the roots to grow very shallowly, since they don’t need to grow down to look for water. That means that the plants dry out easily without the frequent watering, which encourages people to water more often, which keeps the roots shallow, which then sets up a viscious cycle. If you are transitioning from a daily watering schedule to a Flex Daily one, I would probably start out by setting the root depth shallower than the default and increasing it as the plants adapt to the new schedule.

Yep open line, puts out pretty high inches per hour. I try to mimic more of a heavy brief rain because most storms in my area are like that. My trees do well with that setup. I should’ve also mentioned that I plant trees in my yard that don’t grow naturally in my area plus have very thick areas of bentonite clay, not much loam, so I have a more custom scenario. Until I really fine tune zone settings and/or Rachio adds in specific tree types etc, I’m going to stick with the Fixed schedule I know works well.

So Flex Monthly pulls historic weather data? How far back in time does it pull averages? Is there a way to specify how far back it pulls data?