Am requesting a zone setting feature such as a rain efficiency setting.
Why I am requesting this? I have noticed that when it rains, certain zones, due to property and environmental characteristics, don’t take in the rainfall amounts in its entirety or more than others.
Examples:
Ex. 1 Shrub Lines that is close to the building where the protruding roof is above, don’t get much of the rain, and in some cases, at all.
Ex. 2 Shrub and trees with certain canopy characteristics would allow uneven precipitation of canopy water to the root baseline. I have observed water just precipitating on the edge of the canopy line and trickling at the trunk, also dry mulch under canopy.
Ex. 3 Tree canopy preventing even distribution over turf (kind of a repeat).
Ex. 4 Slope of turf and soil texture. If a heavy downpour occur, then the infiltration rate may not keep up with the rain downpour rate leading to run off. I observe this where the flats had deeper water saturation than sloped portions.
Ex. 5 Flood landscape plants, like a zone where run off accumulates and designed to reduce water surface settle time, take more water than other zones.
+1 I could certainly use this. The only thing that saves me is I’m in California, so it only rains like 5 months of the year (Nov-Mar) and the effects to me of the uneven rain are minor vs if (God forbid) it were to rain in July.
+1 on this - specifically for zones shielded from precipitation.
I have a zone that sits just under the overhang of my roof, so it receives little to no rainfall regardless of what the weather station reports. Right now, Rachio still applies precipitation data to that zone’s moisture balance, which means it skips or shortens watering runs that the zone actually needs.
It would be great to have a per-zone toggle or slider to ignore (or reduce) precipitation adjustments. Something like a “precipitation exposure” setting - 0% for a fully covered zone, 100% for open sky, and anything in between. This way the smart schedule can still do its thing for sun, wind, and ET, but just not credit rain that never actually reaches the zone.
This seems like it could live right alongside the existing zone settings (soil type, slope, sun exposure, etc.) and would be a natural fit for how Rachio already thinks about zone-level customization.
