Scheduling to end before sunrise?

I set one of my zones to schedule to end before sunrise because it was recommended, and then I scheduled another session and I am trying to figure out how best to set it.

  1. What does it mean that it will schedule to end before sunrise. Does this mean it will schedule it as close to possible to end before sunrise OR could it end within 20 minutes, 30 mins, etc.? Should I just set the schedule for the other zone to End before a specific time that should not conflict with the other one, like 3am?

Thanks

@RainHusk - the end before sunrise will always calculate the maximum amount of time Rachio needs to run all zones for their full duration and any applicable soak and cycle time - even if only one zone needs to run. So it won’t end just minutes before sunrise. I’d probably recommend setting two schedules with fixed start time.

1.) I am going to need to get 3 separate Rachio devices. Do they all talk to each other when calculating the maximum amount of time they need to run all zones for their full duration? OR do they all work independently of each other?

2.) Just curious why you suggested fixed start times? That is what I ended up doing.

Thanks

They run independent of each other. There’s no coordination.

There’s several ways to deal with this kind of issue, but are you creating one schedule for all the zones in each Rachio, or are you saying you will have multiple schedules on each Rachio as well as three Rachio? You must have a lot of zones… yikes…

End before sunrise seems worthless. I have 8 grass zones and my watering wants to start at 12am-1am. It is a best practice to not run in the middle of the night and that would be super easy to implement. Just add a “do not water” hour range. For now, I set my grass schedule to start at 4am flex daily and tricked the scheduler by disabling half the zones on day 1 so they would run the next day. Next up is a cup test to figure out how to deal with overlapping zones and Rachio’s inability to account for them.

This “End before sunrise” has been brought up before to Rachio. They haven’t seemed to address/fix it. Allowing the sprinklers to run in the middle of the night like this promotes disease and fungus. Not sure why it’s still marked as “Recommended”

Best workaround I found for flex daily is to set it to “end by 8am”
Seems to work great for me.

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The total duration of my Flex Daily is 5 hrs and according to the log, the longest run so far has been 90 mins usually starting around 11pm. With the sun going up around 6:30am-7am, judging by the comments here, there are two options:

  1. backout the hours of 11pm-4am
  2. set “end by” to 4am+5hrs=9am

are there any pro/cons to either?