Recently switched to a fixed schedule that waters Tuesday / Thursday/ Saturday (restrictions).
It has been raining all day Friday and all day Saturday and yet I saw the sprinklers running this morning - However it’s skipped all the other watering this week when it’s thought it would rain but didn’t so now I have a long dies on Fridays and gets overwatered on rainy days.
What the heck is going on here? What am I paying for?
Are you using a PWS (that’s the best way to make sure it’s getting the rain recorded close to you)? And if you are, is the PWS still recording precipitation?
Personally I have found PWS (personal weather stations) to be a gamble for accurate weather data because they are not always well maintained or components like the rain sensor may not be working. If you really want to fix this, buy your own PWS that you can control and maintain but it is not cheap to have a well made weather station.
The government maintained weather sensors (the ones visible with PWS selector set to off) will be most accurate but if they are more than a few miles away, they may not do a good job at recording scattered shower data (ie. you got ran but the actual weather station did not; so it is watering based on the weather station’s weather data). Even with govt. maintained weather stations set, scattered showers are possible where it rains in the weather sensor location and not your house (or vice versa). and may require some intervention on your part. If you know that you dont need water and you glance at your schedule and see that it wants to water, you can cancel it before it runs. Another option is to wire in an external rain sensor to the Rachio which will prevent the system from running when it detects rainfall (but they are a dumb sensor that cannot relay the amount of rain measured to the controller). Here is a video on how to do that: https://youtu.be/Co10JIT3ykk
To get the most savings out of your device will require a little more intervention and monitoring on your part to get the most out of it. If you are looking for fully automatic (hands off), just set it to flex monthly and let it water like a traditional controller. The Flex monthly will water more often compared to flex daily but it will adjust to the season each month where you will see the most savings in the shoulder seasons during Spring and Fall.
I switched FROM Flex, because I have watering restricted to 4 hours 3x a week.
To be honest I’m pretty disappointed in the Rachio and may take it back. It’s marketed as a smart, set it and forget it irrigation controller but this thing has required me to spend so much effort to get it to do it’s most basic job and it continues to fail.