As I prepare to start up the Rachio that Santa so thoughtfully gave me for Christmas, I thought I would quiclky browse the Community forum for some tips. Glad I did!! I have determined my available water capacity and soil type because of great advice here. Now for my next problem. My yard is flat with silty clay and St Augustine. It is almost completely shaded by multiple huge old live oak trees. Due to lack of sun I am sure (yes I know I should go check the actual depth of my grass roots) that my grass RZD is shallow. I do not think I need to worry so much about the trees. Their tap roots and horizontal root systems are massive. I am just trying to get a handle on settings so my 14 zones are not watering a ton due to shallow RZD
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Changing your root zone depth (RZD) won’t necessarily use more water (overall), it will adjust your bucket size (how much water it takes to fill up your zone, and how long it takes to get fully depleted over a number of days) which will change how frequent (or infrequent) you are watering (which can be tracked on each zone by viewing their soil moisture graph).
I would probably start with one or two zones in a flex daily schedule to see how well they track (using the default RZD) for a bit, and if you need more frequent/infrequent watering you can adjust RZD or crop coefficient (easiest way to adjust frequency).
For our next major software release we are working on an easier way to allow folks to adjust flex daily frequency with a simple adjustment and not necessarily have to understand all of the advanced settings (if they choose not to).
Here are some quick ways to adjust flex daily
http://support.rachio.com/article/385-flex-schedule-tips
This has a good synopsis of all documentation pertaining to flex daily
http://community.rachio.com/t/flex-schedule-guidelines-and-documentation/3799
Hope this helps!
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