Let me know how you get on with the smart watering!
If you are only watering grass then you have the advantage of each zone being of one type of soil etc. My issue is that I have replaced the poor quality grass with artificial grass and each zone now contains a mixture of plants, soils and pots for which I was unable to successfully set up smart watering so have reverted back to fixed times for each zone which we amend every couple of months depending on the weather.
@Spanish-garden @Pedro I am considering the Rachio 3 for a large urbanization community in Mojacar. We have large gardens so we need to look at Smart Watering.
Firstly, do instructions come in Spanish ? I want the local gardeners to be fully responsible for the system.
Secondly, can the one install be logged onto by multiple people with the app installed ?
Thirdly, I thought the Rachio 3 was more clever than the 2, and there is a PWS installed by someone about 2 miles away (although we could go and get our own). Are you saying 100% that if it had just rained, or is about to bucket down, that the system would still water anyway ? Or it will water just as much on a cool day as on a baking hot day ?
We are using 1000’s of m3 per year for our gardens, so we need to be just using only what we need, and save as much as possible
Thanks in advance
Hola championc
No, there are no instructions in spanish and there is also no option to select a different language in the Rachio app.
You can install the app on multiple devices / for multiple people but there is no ability to set a user type so everybody can do absolutely everything via the app, which is far from ideal. If you have multiple users, who will take responsibility?
I don’t have a Rachio 3 (just 2 x Rachio 2) but I have been unable to get SEASONAL SHIFT working. The reason I have been given by Rachio is that the historical weather data is only available for USA and Canada. In Spain it goes through the motions and sends an email every month but never changes anything.
I have just searched on RAIN SKIP and found this explanation which suggests Rachio does take into account rainfall in the last 24 hours as well as projected rainfall in the next 24 hours, which is better than I thought. In which case I suggest it would be worth your while installing your own PWS as rainfall could be a lot different 2 miles away. WIND SKIP is only really relevant if you are using sprayers and prevents watering if it’s so windy that the water is likely to miss it’s target. So should probably be turned off if you are only using drippers / leaky pipe. And I think SATURATION SKIP is difficult to use on legacy systems where zones contain a mixture of plant types and pots.
My FIXED SCHEDULE setup definitely does water just as much on a cool day as on a baking hot day. However, if you can define the types of soil and plant per zone better that me, maybe the flexible daily/monthly schedules will work better for you?
And a possible way of overcoming the lack of seasonal shift would be for you to increase/decrease water times per zone on a percentage basis every month. And if you are happy with the results then I suggest you look at Home Assistant that can interface to Rachio and one day might allow you to fully automate the monthly changes you need e.g. number of minutes per zone (it doesn’t allow this yet but somebody may add this functionality soon).