Rain skip threshold needs lots of work

I live in central Florida and my lawn needs 1-1.5" of water a week. The default rain skip threshold when I installed the device was 0.125". That is extremely low, especially when considering the rachio was not scheduling itself to deliver 1.5" of water a week (using all the recommended settings). To me, it seems that if I need 1.5" of water, and I can only water 2x a week, the rain skip threshold should be .75".

I’d miss entire days of watering just because it lightly sprinkled, and my lawn was getting about 1/5 of the water it needed.

The threshold should take into account the area you live, the amount of water your lawn needs, and the amount of time the rachio is scheduling itself to run. Without these metrics, the rain skip threshold seems to be more dangerous than useful.

I understand it’s very easy to go tweak this setting myself, but I purchased the Rachio because it was supposed to be smarter than me when it comes to lawn watering. Overlooking this setting, especially when it has all the data it needs, is a huge gap and makes me feel the system is not any better than the “dumb” Rainbird sensor I replaced.

You are just one ecosystem that Rachio sells in. If I set mine to 1.5" here in Arizona, I’d almost NEVER get a rain skip. Is .125" probably a bit light for many areas? Sure, but the flip side would be every person coming to the community complaining that their Rachio watered while it is raining…

At the end of the day, you want Rachio to be smart (which it is), but Rachio can’t know all the details of your yard, your ecosystem, etc. without you entering that information into it.

Agreed on these concepts, I’ve shared this with our product team.

Thank you for sharing this with us!

We need special software for Arizona. The desert is not kind to irrigation!

:cheers:

2 Likes

I too live in central Florida. I too almost lost my lawn to Rachio. Forget the flex scheduling it not accurate and the reporting stations are general coverage. I was 5 mile from my house and it rains like hell open and I got home not one drop of rain.

I set my Rachio ( hunter min) rain gauge to 1 inch and set for wind and freezing. Weather intelligence is useless here. I have one schedule enable as season determined. I have servers fix scheduled with 3 days, 4 days, half cycle for shorter run time. And garden zone and lawn zone. All with a 10 min manual cycle and soak. Garden and side yards run for 15 min, large areas 50 min. Keep in mind the 10 soak splits the zone and runs the rest of the zones and repeated the remaining time on each zone. I also water in the late evening hrs. So the grass has time to soak up the water.

You can quick run any schedule you disabled. They soak cycle is not perfect. It should be on each zone not the schedule. but I’m done asking to changes.

Good luck