Rain and saturation skip too random to be of any use

Getting Started
1

Its mind boggling how random the so-called Rachio weather intelligence is.

  1. Last month is rained for 10 days. No skip. I manually disabled the schedules.
  2. I forgot to re-enable the schedules when I was traveling. Came back to dry yards and enabled the schedules. Rachio then proceeded to apply “saturation skips” to dry yards that had not been watered for a week. I turned off saturation skips.
  3. It has been raining now for 2 days. No rain skips from Rachio.
    Please stop calling this behavior “intelligence” when it overwaters AND underwaters.
2

As you probably have heard, a common computer term is garbage in, garbage out. I bring that up only because the same is set with any computer algorithm or intelligence. For me, I see the intelligence is only as good as the weather that is being analyzed. I occasionally seen skips happening when it should not and vice versa because of either the weather station or localized weather patterns. However, it is nowhere near what you are describing so I do wonder about how far away the weather station is. It reminds me of talking to my mom frequently she thinks that I am snowed because of the weather reports that she sees, where reality is that we have clear skies despite the weather report.

3

I’ve just experienced Rachio weather intelligence as well this morning.
Been raining here for a couple of days in Southern CA. I used the iPhone app Precip for my home location and it reported rain in the last 12 hours at .31 inches; last 24 hours at .35 inches at 8:00AM today. My local flood control district shows .35 inches over the last 24 hours starting at 8:00 AM today. Today at 3:26 AM I skipped a scheduled watering of my lawn at 3:28 AM as no rain skip was shown. At 6:05 AM Rachio skipped my Veggie Bed schedule because it showed .14 inches of rain (not sure over what period of time?). So it appears that the Rachio weather is showing less than half of the rain that Precip and my local flood control district is showing.

  1. Is there anyway to correct this other than setting the Rachio threshold from .125 inches to maybe .0625 inches?
  2. I manually stopped the grass schedule a few minutes before it started. Should I have waited and then skipped if it went on?
  3. I looked on the Rachio app and it showed for yesterday Precipitation of 0.07 inches and today May 5 app of 0.00 inches as of 8:25 AM. Shouldn’t it have shown >0.125 somewhere as it auto skipped the Veggie Bed schedule. Shouldn’t have been around the 0.31 inches shown by my other sources?
  4. Any suggestions as to how improve this feature?
4

Failed to mention that the Grass schedule is on Flex Monthly; the Veggie is Fixed

5

I know this is simple, but good to double check. Is the address correct within your home settings and what does it say for your weather source?

1 Like
6

Thomas: Good point. I will check weather source.