Rachio Your Weather Intelligence Programming Is Useless

Troubleshooting
1

It hasn’t rained in 5 days, it’s been over 80 degrees the past 3 days and today it was over 90 degrees, yet my Rachio decided to apply a Saturation Skip instead of watering today. When I got my Rachio it worked great, then about 2 years ago it started to prioritize not doing it’s job over doing it’s job, which is to water my lawn so I don’t have to.

The programming has gotten so bad that I have manually watered the lawn more times than the Rachio, who’s one job is to water the lawn has, watered the lawn.

At this point I have to ask myself is the Rachio doing it’s job and solving my problem, or is it making more work me because it thinks it’s new job is not to water. When I first got my Rachio I was happy to recommend it to other people, at this if someone asked me I would tell to avoid Rachio at all costs.

My day job is in an IT adjacent industry, and part of that involves reverse engineering adversarial programming algorithms, so I can “see programming” from the other side of the screen. My decades of professional experience reverse engineering programming tells me it’s extremely obvious Rachio has prioritized saving water, and has emphasized using water,

I’m going to be forced to look for a new solution that does what I tell it to do, and not what some programmer thinks it should do.

2 Likes
2

I wonder about some of your settings and how you manually water. These can make a difference in the results of the algorithm.

3

I would disable saturation skip and increase your precipitation thresholds, that should take care of a lot of the false positives.

Here is more information on how to adjust those settings.

:cheers:

4

I have had my device for years and it was working fine, up until about 2 years ago then it became less reliable. This year it has been useless.

I didn’t change any of the settings.

If there was an update that “helped me” and changed the settings for me I wouldn’t know.

Since the saturation skip occurs before I intervene and manually water, it’s impossible that me manually watering is affecting the saturation skip.

I’m manually watering in response to the algorithm failing and not watering, not sure how you think “I’m doing it wrong”

5

Why was it it working and now it’s not if I didn’t change anything?

Why has it’s performance become completely unacceptable this year if I didn’t change anything?

If it used to work and now it doesn’t and I didn’t make changes there’s only one place the changes could have been made. Why would the programmers publish new code that requires end users update their saturation Skip levels, and then not tell them

1 Like
6

The engineering team hasn’t changed those watering algorithms for many, many years.

Without reviewing the last couple years of how the system was operating I don’t know. The only difference I can think of is if you are experiencing different types of weather than years past or started using a different weather station or weather source.

7

Check the weather station that you have set up in Rachio to make sure that it is still accurately reporting weather.

Whether you agree, the Rachio algorithms follow the tried and true rules of ET, crop coefficients, etc that have been developed in the commercial and professional ag and turf world for years. There is nothing wrong with how it choses to water, just the settings you chose to put in there.

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