I installed a Rachio 3 controller just after having some landscaping work done, and setup seems overly complex given what I think should be a fairly common scenario. I have a zone that is a lawn with a bunch of newly layed seed. And another zone with a bunch of newly planted plants. But both of the flex schedule options seem to assume that the lawn and yard are long established growth and want to set up watering schedules that are much too infrequent and long. In order to fix that it seems like I need to learn a bunch of esoteric formulas about crop coefficients, root depth, etc. It would be nice to have a built in switch to say, “I just planted a bunch of grass seed here” or “all of these plants are new”, and the flex modes could set up a schedule that watered more frequently at first and adjusted appropriately over time as they became established.
In general, I wish there were some intermediate settings between “this zone has bushes” on one end of complexity and “nozzle inches per hour” on the other where I could tell it more general information about what I have growing without a huge learning curve.
Hi @ericw for the new seeding we would recommend to use Fixed type of schedule and select Hourly interval (which will allow you to run your zones every couple hours). You can switch to the flex schedule after the new seed is settled.
You can read more about it here:
Thanks for the quick reply! Yeah, I saw that page and moved the lawn to a daily (it’s been growing a little while now) fixed schedule. Then I hacked around with the monthly flex advanced settings to find a combination that waters the new plants in the yard a bit more frequently than the default settings. It’s all totally doable, don’t get me wrong.
This is just a feature request that it would be nice if there was some logic built in to handle these situations a bit more smoothly. I’m a forgetful person who doesn’t know a whole lot about irrigation. The Rachio 3 is a super smart controller that knows tons about all that and never forgets. It’d be nice to just check a box when I set up the flex schedule saying that a zone was recently seeded/planted and have the dynamic scheduler take that into account and adjust over time as things settle in.
I agree- I wish that under the zone there was a button to press for new planting to increase frequency of watering for a week or two. I am lazy and don’t want to have to set up a new schedule
