I run the flex monthly schedule on my Rachio 3 for the last several years. I’ve generally learned to live with it’s quirks and limitations, especially it’s desire to over water my yard because it will only consider +/-24 hours of rain when deciding to trigger a skip.
However, last night, after raining all afternoon…my system failed utterly to initiate a skip and ran the full cycle last night. I was shocked when I woke up this morning and had the notification icon on my phone that the schedule had run as normal.
To add insult to injury, it even showed the 1.26" of rain that my weather station recorded yesterday. My skip threshold is at 0.125" (which was the lowest possible setting, I changed it to 0.0625" today now that I see that as a possibility).
I don’t expect a lot from this thing. I expect it to adjust the watering schedule monthly over the course of the year and put down water on that schedule. I expect I’m going to have to remember to force it to skip watering when I’ve gotten 2" of rain 24.0001 hours before the next schedule watering.
I don’t expect to have to manually tell it to not water after it’s been raining all day, especially when the unit acknowledged that it knows it’s been raining all day.
I’m not fully familiar with the Flex Monthly option, but what does the Soil Moisture data chart show ? It may we’ll be that the system didn’t think that the rain provided enough water, and it therefore went ahead itself.
Click into a zone and check the graph and the data.
Quite frankly, it’s enough of a challenge keeping an eye on the thing when it’s on a “predictable” schedule…which failed again here in the last couple of days by running the watering cycle even after it had indicated that it was going to run a rain skip due to my rain thresh hold being exceeded.
I don’t have enough confidence in this anymore to let it run on its own with a daily evaluation.
Unfortunately, that’s proving true. The main point of this device is to avoid over watering. I replaced a “dumb” sprinkler controller that ran on a schedule that I would setup and I would have to go to the panel and turn the controller off to skip watering cycle.
This lastest failure is particularly disturbing as I had checked the app earlier in the day and it indicated a rain skip was in effect (as we had plenty of rain that day) and to hit the button in the app if I wanted to “cancel this skip”. The next morning, I had the notification in my phone that the watering cycle ran.
Right now, the app is showing a rain skip for tonight’s watering. I’m going to have to remember to check the app when the cycle is supposed to start to make sure it doesn’t run.
I don’t see how this is an improvement to my lifestyle.
I read, here, when I was first setting up our Rachio 3, that Flex Monthly had “issues,” and to use Flex Daily, instead. So I did.
I could never get Flex Daily to work correctly, and I spent a lot of time researching, studying, and tweaking it. It would either water way too little or way too much. At one point it over-watered so badly I developed a serious lawn fungus problem throughout the entire lawn. Luckily, I was able to save my lawn with anti-fungal treatments.
I switched to a fixed even days schedule with Weather Intelligence. I already had a Hunter Mini-Clik rain sensor attached.
It’s watered about as perfectly as I could ask, ever since.
Yes, it rained. Yes the weather station (my station actually) reported it and it even shows the amount in the calendar on the day it decided to water anyway. The rain amount was above the thresh hold (which I’ve set to the minimum 0.0625").
At least the most recent weather skip appears to have been successful.
I’ve been reading here and other places like reddit where it seems this issue is happening a lot more lately. It used to be that, if it rained the day of a scheduled watering, the watering would skip. Now, even it if tells me it’s going to skip, I can’t rely on that and have to check at the time the schedule would kick off to make sure that it actually skipped.
