@franz Can you confirm this?
Interesting! I am seeing the exact same thing, Checked several zones and they are capping out with rain at 110% (except for my drips that are capping out at 108%).
@franz, something changed?
Yes, a couple weeks ago I believe with the default cool season grass crop coefficient, I must have forgot to reference that change in the forums.
This number has been changed a few times, almost sorry we ever introduced it.
10% feels safer on both ends of the spectrum.
I don’t plan on changing this again in the foreseeable future.
Good to know. And 10% makes just as much sense as 20% to my uneducated brain. But I think introducing it made logical sense and I’m glad you did.
I’m sure you are surprised by how much we data geeks watch the details on the charts!!! (In my case, it’s to see if I have things tuned in well.)
Now the one that I’m hoping that you can figure out is a way of addressing what I personally see as need to manage negative moisture levels. I know that you only go to zero right now, and as long as the next daily watering is more than the ET for the next day it’s probably just fine, but when the ET starts being more than the precip, the soil can start getting behind. I have no idea if it would be better to bump up the watering time to match, allow watering more than once in the day, or some other solution.
My theory is that you should water more than once per day. Increasing watering time would water beyond the root zone, which isn’t helpful.
But if your MAD is at 25% and because you went down to say 40% because it didn’t water, if you increased watering time, you wouldn’t be going past the root depth, right? Wouldn’t you just be watering a little deeper to catch up what depleted? The same as if you had changed the MAD to a higher percentage it will increase the watering time.
@linn I think it depends. Per the Rachio support article you’re correct that there is still water in the root zone.
However, it also states the following:
If your MAD is set to 25% to make your vegetation happy, how will it do if it starts to drop to 40%? It seems that there’s a chance it will still suffer. Again, I’m certainly no expert! It’s just my personal interpretation of the articles.
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OK, I know you were almost sorry to introduce this, but I am glad you did. But now I’m really wondering about the 10% cap instead of 20% cap – and this may be related to some of the comments I’ve seen from the California folks who’ve had a ton of rain.
I’m predicted to get over 2" of rain in the next couple of days. I know someone of that will be runoff, as the soil will become saturated. But the Crop Evapotranspiration levels are pretty low, it’s supposed to rain Sunday and Monday, watering is predicted to not happen on Tuesday, but the system wants to water again on Wednesday. I know that’s what the math works out with 110%, but just logically, it seems that my soil is really going to be pretty darn wet on Wednesday.
Hopefully, my rain sensor will not dry out, and it will prevent the system from watering.
Just wondering if you have any other thoughts on this? As well as maybe changing it to be a little higher for saturation?
Saturation levels will be increased with v3. Once they are finalized and the software is available, I will publish the new levels.
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Two years later (June 2019) and I see only 110% as the maximum saturation level.
What am I missing?