I live in South Fla., and just got the Rachio 3 from Costco installed by someone. My system is an index valve system and I believe it has six zones. In the App it is setup as a “Well or Pump Start Relay” as suggested in your articles. Also, I have water supply from the county… Previously it was hooked up to the Itermatic T8845PV timer.
For the rachio I had setup a six zone Fixed schedule to run Mon., Wed., and Friday for like 13 minutes a zone. When zone 1 kicked off it ran for 13 minutes, but after that it would not shift to the next watering zone. I tried running zone 2 manually and nothing would happen… Then I tried running zone 1 again manually, and it shifted to the next watering zone and started watering.
I researched on your forums a bit and noticed a suggestion, where I had to setup six individual schedules for zone 1 , zone 2, etc… But used zone 1 for all of the schedules…
As a test I let the zone 1 individual schedules run in 15 min intervals, and it worked shifting from Zone 1 to Zone 2, etc., all schedules configured under zone 1.
I guess the Rachio 3 sees an index valve system as only zone 1. You have to setup multiple zone 1 schedules with different times to allow it to keep shifting to the next zone of sprinklers.
Is this the best way to set the schedules up to work with an index valve system?
The indexing system needs a break between zones to cycle the valve to the next station. Be sure not to specify the reduce water hammer option in Rachio as that may confuse things. Also, I think there needs to be delay between zones that can be set in the master valve/pump start relay area.
The only wires that should be connected from the Rachio to the solenoid before the indexing valve will be the pump/master valve and common wires. There should be no wires connected to the numbered zone ports.
To get the most out of your Rachio Gene and I would recommend replacing the indexing valve with a manifold bank of valves (which Gene’s post shows how to do).
It is the future intent to switch out the indexing valve to a manifold bank of valves but in the immediate time, I just need to get the system running. I still haven’t found information on how to set up a delay between zones. Hoping that customer support can help.
Yeap, had the delay setup in my first scenario and it didn’t work. However, in my second scenario the delay was also setup, but my I had set individual fixed schedules pointing only to zone 1 and this worked.
