There seems to be an issue with Seasonal shift applied to my summer schedule for June. The watering times haven’t increased from May. For the seasonal shift to be applied for June, looks like it picked up the previous watering time from April and not May. With the proposed watering time and temperature at 100F with no rain in forecast, I am pretty confident that something went wrong here. For your reference, in June of 2017, the schedule ran for 2hr 20 mins (watering day) or so and for this month, it says 1hr 39 mins. I would appreciate if you can please look into this.
Yes, i totally agree. I’m new to Rachio, but its 90 in Denver all week with no rain and the “seasonal” shift added 1 minute to my schedule. Lawn is already browning out in the sunny spots.
We reviewed your schedule and it looks like on May 31st you decreased watering duration down to 99 minutes.
This effectively told the system that you would like your zones watered about 34% less than our recommended watering times. For an example, if you re-create your schedule for zone 1 (which went from 10 minutes --> 12 minutes) the recommend time is actually 18 minutes for this month. Based on your previous adjustments, when the system increased your watering times it accounted for the adjustments (downward) formerly made.
My recommendation would be to re-create your schedule, review our suggested runtimes, modify accordingly, and then understand that any modifications will impact future seasonal monthly changes.
Thank you for looking into it. You are correct. I changed the watering time on May 31. A little background on this. I had increased it recently as we had unexpected warmer temperatures in the last 2 weeks of May and the Rachio’s recommendation wasnt enough from my perspective. So, on May 31, I changed the watering times back to what Rachio had recommended me on May 1 and the reason I did this was to make sure that Rachio doesnt get the impression when applying seasonal shift that I intend to water more. Looks like as you mentioned, this went the other way and hence it did not increase.
As I set the watering time on May 31 to what Rachio recommended on May 1, shouldnt Rachio ignore that I decreased the watering times and check to see if watering time on May 31 and May 1 match? If it closely matches, then Rachio should increase or decrease accordingly based on weather for the month. This way we have the flexibility of increasing or decreasing without throwing off Rachio’s seasonal shift.
We did find an issue that @theflexdude is going to fix. The system was deriving the baseline minutes from your next scheduled watering (which would have been June) and then using that as the baseline to adjust each zone’s coefficient. There was some reasons for doing that, but my view was that was the worser of evils. We are going with the lesser of evils and will always use the month you are adjusting in for the baseline minutes. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
Ok thank you again. One last question on your previous suggestion of creating a new schedule. As a work around (as I would like to avoid creating the schedule from scratch), I will get the Rachio recommended minutes for this month and with this data, can I go ahead and increase the watering time in the existing summer schedule? Will this be any different than creating a new schedule? Thanks.
I set up my new Rachio in May or June using 44 total minutes (all 6 zones total) x 3 times a week as this amount of watering has worked well in the past. I got the July Seasonal Shift email saying 44 minutes would remain at 44 minutes. I just got the August Seasonal Shift email that said there would again be no change, still 44 minutes. July was ten-fifteen plus degrees hotter than May and August will even be hotter. Why isn’t the Rachio automatically increasing the total amount of watering?
It is less than 1 degree Fahrenheit average temperature change between July and August for your area based on 30 year averages. So with a 3 days a week (rather high frequency) schedule you wouldn’t see a significant change in durations.
I also see the +1 degree average temperature change from July to August, but I also see a 4 degree increase from June to July. Both months showed no change (44 minutes). 5 degrees seems like a significant rise in temperature, enough to increase the watering times. Plus I have to say, with global warming (and we feel it here), a 30 year average may no longer be accurate. It is currently 80 degrees (was 91 in my car on Wednesday) and has been so since the beginning of July.
June has 30 days versus 31 days in July and August. Therefore a 3 days a week schedule will on average water 30 * 3 / 7 = 12.88 times in 30 day month and 31 * 3 / 7 = 13.3 times in 31 day month. So for zone 2 for example, in June total month duration was 61.875 minutes and in July 63.9375 minutes. Therefore each watering in June was 61.875 / 12.88 = 4.8 minutes and in July 63.9357 / 13.3 = 4.8 minutes. No change in duration due to more waterings in a month. These are commended durations without your user adjustment of 1.6 (60% increase) which becomes 8 minutes. I hope this helps understand the system better. Let me know if you have more questions.
