Are you a shill for Rachio?
This is sold as a CONSUMER product. It is not ready for consumption as a consumer (lowest common denominator) product. aka. it’s not dumb-down enough for the general public. The advanced settings make no sense to the average consumer. Nor does the company support questions from their users. That’s my point. That’s my claim.
Nope. Just a person who was doubtful at first, but asked questions, got good answers, learned out the system works, and am very pleased with it. It would have operated fine for me, without all my questions and such, but I’m a retired engineer, and like to know how and why things work. IMHO, Rachio schedules work quite well for the common denominator consumer. My previous controller told me nothing: I had to set up every zone’s times, etc., through trial and error. Or just listen to the contractor: “20 minutes a day for every zone.”
Rachio asks questions every user should be able to answer, sets up a schedule on that basis, and gives you tools to adjust if it’s not doing it quite right. Don’t like all the variables and want to go back to specifying time? Rachio does that too with the Fixed schedule. And unlike my old controller, even the Fixed schedule can automatically vary when and how much water is applied based on time of year. I used to have to look up a FRET value to change the Budget % each week, and stop the controller manually when it rained. All that is history, with Rachio.
All that is why the Rachio 3 seems to garner almost all the awards and places first in tests. As to company support, I’ve had a lot of my questions answered by company personnel; even the Rachio Founder is active on the forums, and I’ve gotten every answer I’ve asked answered promptly and properly. Not always by Rachio personnel; they’re probably actually, uh, working? But experienced users are a great help too, if you’re willing to use them.
But regardless, you’ve made up your own mind, and you’re allowed to be unhappy and return the unit or whatever. For whatever reason, it may not suit you. Fine. Just leave us out of your class action suit. 
I respectfully beg to differ with this. It’s a community forum, so most of the input/questions on here are from the community. However, Rachio DOES monitor the forums, and the co-founder frequently chimes in. I understand that they are a small company. But I have gotten way more support here than from many other companies. Most of them don’t have community forums.
@Bsac Apologies if our product isn’t meeting your expectations. If you would like a refund just PM me and I can get the right team on that process.
rraisley - This is exactly my point. We are not all ENGINEERS!
You shouldn’t have to be an ENGINEER to buy a consumer - level product for your household.
This is where ENGINEERS are so dumb. They don’t know what they don’t know.
Life is not a math problem. Please get some help.
Our team is working on adaptive schedules for next year that will be obfuscating (hiding?) advanced zone settings to help allow consumers to give simple feedback and allow the system to take on more of the heavy lifting on schedule modifications.
Finally…the voice of reason…
I spent the weekend building a spreadsheet to reverse engineer rachio and try to build a prediction model, that i can correlate with my actual water consumption to try to get a grip on where water is spent and why it is spent there.
I actually think rachio is a bit complicated to get right, but once you get it right it seems reasonable.
the UI uses scientifically correct language that i think is inaccessible to many regular folks. I think the language can be simplified by a lot.
Much of the language makes the device needlessly inaccessible
Let me make an example. allowed depletion could be told with simpler and more descriptive language that has fewer domain knowledge assumptions in it. ie.
management allowed depletion = do you want frequent and shallow watering or deeper infrequent watering? That is basically what this affects. It doesnt’ call it that, but it is what it does. The tricky part it says % and starts at 50%. So it means that once 50% of the water in the soil for the root depth in the zone has been consumed it will start to water again to replenish the soil. But 50% is easy…
Setting it at 10% is trickier, does that mean that when 10% has been consumed we replenish with water? Or does it mean that when it is 10% water left in the soil rachio starts to replenish. Nothing in the UI tells you which it is. This could use more obvious language (or a help button to explain which it is).
Now, i come to understand in crop science circles it means exactly one thing. But in hobbyist and back yard gardening circles can you really make that assumption? I think this is a great example of how language gets in the way of understanding.
My point is that the language must not make the product inaccessible -and i think this is the point that the original poster is making. Me, i’m an engineer so i took the time to read up (and i got help from the retired engineer in this post to lay out the math for me to understand).
My criticism:
Root depth and crop factor is essential to get right. yet there is no real database one can use to lookup common crops like citrus trees, hybrid roses, tomatoes, cucumbers, raspberries etc. There is no community database on the forum for users to provide their insight into crop factors and root depth. I spent an hour trying to figure out root depth of a pomegranate and a fig tree together with their crop coefficiencies. Rachio provides no help when those two are in the same zone.
Grasses seems to be off. I verified the default vs. an sample, and rachio’s default was much deeper roots than my sample. Since there is no community validation, its hard to tell if the default is typical in the community or if it is high/low -this is where social networks shine. "others using rachio and overrides the setting typically set this to this number. In your plant hardiness zone (as calculated from your zip code) users typically set this to X depth for the type of crop you listed.
These are inputs to get to a mathematical model of the crops water need and how that can be applied to the soil.
I also find that you either measure each zone carefully and use a flow meter to calculate the inches per hour of nozzle output (which i did, since i have lots of drip lines), or you do a catch cup test (which only works if you have rotators). There is little guidance and help to get this rock solid, and i think more can be done to guide the user here. I think you can be a bit explicit in expert mode and say that this needs to be really correct or your water schedule will be wrong. Use better defaults and more types of emitters, drip lines etc (ideally identified by manufacturer name/model) to reduce error rates.
What i feel is missing:
i’d love if i can get a zone to tell me when i click on it: this zone needs 2 inches of water of irrigation this week under current weather conditions. you kind of have to click into moisture zones and add up a week of evap to get that right -its not user friendly.
I would love it even more if it said, using historical data this zone should use this many inches of water in october, XX in november, YY in december.
Fundamentally I’d love to see how seasons and historical data would affect my zone with the crops in that zone.
I would use that by taking an unused zone and use that to plan planting of crops using fictional values by cloning my settings from an already defined zone but change the crop type to see what happens. that would help me in planning to be more waterwise, which i would love.
Rachios issue isn’t science, its the user interface
I’m convinced about this. The key work you need to do is guide the customer, have more validations on inputs any which way you can do it, and provide more feedback loops that connects the input to the real world to make it so it has fewer errors.
I haven’t given it a ton of thought for how to simplify the user interface but to me there are a few super important variables that must be done right:
root depth (which for your exact crop you typically can lookup on the internet, adjust for maturity)
allowed depletion
crop coefficient (which for the most part you can look up for your exact crop on the internet)
Nozzle inches per hour (which you should use cups for, or a flow meter and measure the zone square footage that is covered by irrigation very precisely).
The other stuff matters to, but if you get any of the above really wrong it really screws up your yard.
I wish that there was reports that i could run that states “using historical data, this zone would get this much water per week for the next 4 weeks”. I want to make it easy to catch mistakes of either over or under watering on a per zone basis -and that is really hard in the current UI. Its focused on the reporting of here and now + historical but not so much on forecasting the big picture.
Anyway my few cents. And i’m not at the expert level at some of the others in this thread. Just starting to truly get hang of what flex daily really is doing.
I don’t mean to interrupt the flow of the current discussion. I thought I might have things under control based on yesterday’s discussion. But it doesn’t look like that. Because of rain and extra watering I did yesterday (i.e. 23rd) , the Veg Garden zone reached full state. The Flex Daily predicted that I need watering on 27th. It didn’t water the zone today. Below are how my plants look now (as of 5 mins back). They don’t look healthy. They are on their way to wilting state.
Based on my experience with Flex Monthly schedule before, if this zone is watered every day for 8-10 minutes, it wouldn’t get into this state. I tried to play with the zone settings to make the Flex Daily schedule run every day for 8-10 mins, I couldn’t. Below are my zone and Moisture graphs. It waters daily, but only for 2-3 minutes. If I try increasing the time by increasing CC or RZD, it ends up spacing the schedule 2-3 days apart.
Can someone suggest settings that make the Flex Daily water 8-10 mins every day in this climate?
First, in order to stop risking your plant health, and if you have an unused zone, I would put the zone on a fixed schedule so it waters 9 mn every day.
Then create a new zone named Test using an unused Rachio zone output.
I did that and created the following Test zone:
Advanced:
That gave me a 9 mn watering everyday except when there is a cool cloudy day in the forecast
Make a Flex Daily schedule for the test zone, and see how that behaves over the coming week, only touching the below to fine tune it:
Nozzle inch per hour to change the watering time
and Cropped Coefficient to change frequency.
Eventually set the Allowed depletion to 20% and adjust the Nozzle In/h to 1.5 in/h. That will force a more frequent watering without using unrealistic Crop Coeficient.
And see if you can get the consistency you need based on the weather.
First off i am no expert. I’m about 1 weekend in with starting to understand the rachio and i’m no expert.
But i’ll share my opinion.
I wouldn’t muck around with nozzle inches/hr. They are what they are and they should reflect reality.
But do you really have 9.12" of water every hour on your system? that seems like a fairly high amount.
Are your roots really 15" deep? And do you really want to have the system water when 10% of the water has been consumed? That creates a very shallow watering, especially if your inches/hr rate for your water system is incorrect.
I looked up bell peppers (i assume that is the picture you have), and it says that they will have up to 12" root at the end of the season, but that 8" is common. I would probably set mine at 8" if i was in your shoes. Consider that most people online quote mature root depths at the end of the season for landscape raised bed reasons -but you need to water the root that exists today, not the one that may grow to its biggest potential in the future…
But i would first check your flow rate and make sure that it actually outputs 9.12"/hr -that number seems a bit high to me, especially on a drip line. Do you have emitters on the line? What is the emitter next to the bell pepper rated at (gallons per hour is fine, I can convert it). If metafilm what emitters do you have and what are their spacing?
Secondly, put this zone in its own schedule and after you make the changes go into the schedule and check the watering time and the outlook.
Also, double check that you’re actually working on the right zone by turning it one while standing next to it. I fought with a zone from my office until I stepped outside and realized it was mislabeled, I kept on changing a zone for my trees and not my roses. No wonder they where angry with me…
my few cents,.
Thanks @ParB and @scrambler for your suggestions. Like @ParB suggested, the nozzle in per hour is real value measured at main water meter. Please check my previous messages above with a link to the Google sheet how I came up with that number. I believe that number is used by Rachio to report the gallons used by a specific zone. It should be considered kinda constant value. I am looking for recommendations to adjust others to land at 8-10 mins of watering.
I observed Flex Daily schedules let you modify the watering time recommended by the schedule. If I bump the time up there, wondering if it messes up frequency or it is overridden later.
thanks Franz:)
Do a sanity check. do a 20 minute quick run and check the soil 30 minutes after that completes. if you don’t see 2": of moisture in the soil then something doesn’t add up.
i read somewhere that raised bed have a higher evaporative and higher temperature rates than soil which needs to be compensated for. In rachio there may not be a super easy way to do that except going with a time based schedule. Adjusting the nozzle rate to compensate for a different soil evaporation rate seems wrought with danger. Maybe this is where monthly flex is the better choice, if this truly is the issue.
I would double check that you are getting the water down into the soil.
Because this is a vegetable garden, and you have a good feel yourself for what it needs, how about going to just a fixed daily schedule for it. You’ve already observed that it seemed to work well when watering daily. You could turn weather intelligence on for it so that it doesn’t water if you get rain. Seems to me that it would be a whole lot simpler.
That is what I used to have before. I changed all schedules to Flex Daily recently and trying to get that configured right so that I get the best out of Rachio. 
Everyone keeps questioning that 9.12in/hr.
65sqft @ 9.1in/hr would be 951gallons/hr (15.9GPM) for the area. My 5/8th hose, off my irrigation line @ 80psi static wide open no nozzle will only do 12GPM. I think that 12" root depth is your issue though. I doubt your lower 6" of soil is actually dry when your plants are wilting.
Which basically means, you are overwatering when you water, and then top half is drying out before you water again.
My tomato plants in 14" pots require about 1/4gal of water every 3days when its hot, that’s per plant. I water by hand when I see my leaves start to go limp, I look at them a few times a day since I walk around while on the phone working at home.
I question it too. But I think your calculations are off:
65 sq ft x 144 = 9,360 sq in x 9.12 in/hr = 85,363 cu in / hr / 231 = 369.54 GPH / 60 = 6.16 GPM.
So it’s /possible/, just can’t imagine any system putting out over 6 GPM on basically an 8 foot square area, without washing stuff away, and can’t imagine what kind of sprinkler heads would do that.
Dang it, I knew I shouldn’t have done that math in my head at 2am.
Part of the confusion, and I think the previous displeased customer was alluding to was with the all the variables, you can end up “correcting” for this incorrect Nozzle rate by changing other ones. You end up close to the right answer with trial and error, but nothing makes sense.
