Rachio keeps showing 0% even when watering

My app shows 0% soil moisture on 3 of my zones even though they just watered. I can’t figure out why it’s doing this. I will attach photos

What are the advanced settings for those zones? The answer might be there.
Also, why is watering time so short? Maybe that’s a sign of misconfiguration?

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Can you also post “More Details” data for one of the zones? My guess is that you are watering less than the evapotranporation of the grass for the day. Also post your zone advanced settings for one zone. That will help the community in figuring it out.

@Linn is correct, the crop evapotranspiration is more or equal to the amount being irrigated.

If you are in a warm climate, I would choose warm season grass. Noticed your root zone is 4 inches, which seems a bit low. Cool season default is 6 inches, Warm season default is 9 inches.

:cheers:

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This is the front driveway

I’m in Northern California where today was 103 degrees… I have tall fescue and seen that on the cool grass side of things that’s why I picked it… should I go back to warm season grass?

This is the sidewalk grass, only thing different is the heads

I would, and see how the system operates for a week or so.

:cheers:

Since you mentioned you have tall fescue, this type of grass have the longest root depth (2-3 feet) of cool season grass when they are already established. The reason the watering is so short is because you set the root depth to 4in, so it needs to water daily, and replenish what is getting depleted. I personally don’t like to water that frequently because the grass would be more vulnerable to diseases and less resistant to drought. If you want to train your grass to seek water at deeper levels, you can tweak the settings by increasing watering time and frequency. Root Depth is the first that would need to be increased. Rachio default for cool season grass is 6in, but you could try higher since you have tall fescue. Just keep an eye on your grass as you make those changes, because it will tell you when it needs to be watered. Also, if you got Rachio recently, what was your previous watering setting? What you had might guide you to keep things similar.

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Regarding precipitation rates of the nozzles, what type of sprinkler heads you have? Just wondering how you are getting 1.6in/hour precipitation. I am so jealous :slight_smile: I can barely get 0.4in/hour with the Rainbird 5000, and planning on switching to the smaller radius rotor heads to increase the rate. I don’t know why contractors like to install the 5000 series and crank down the radius out of spec.

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I created this spreadsheet to make it easier… I have 4 zones

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@ASinner247 I just noticed that your front driveway has root depth of 5.9in, and based on other settings it should be watering for more than 8min each time. It should be more than sidewalk which has 4in RD, and that’s watering for 10min.

Did you manually change watering time in the schedule? To be sure your are using the calculated watering times, try removing the front driveway zone and saving the schedule, then add it back. Does watering time for that zone go up to 15min? If it does, then maybe the schedule was manually adjusted at some point in time.

A little off-topic, but what should I use for Kentucky Blue Grass? We are in Minnesota.