I just received a notification yesterday that my Rachio has applied a “Seasonal Shift” to my watering schedule, and it looked like the watering times were all reduced by a few minutes for each zone. It’s my understanding that this is based on “historical data”, but I promise, it’s just as hot on August 1st and 2nd in North Texas as it was on July 31st, so I don’t see how a Seasonal Shift right now makes any sense. Maybe in the fall, but no during hellish-hot August around here.
I’m beginning to 2nd-guess my Rachio purchase because of weird stuff like this, so I’m curious to get thoughts from others. It just seems like the best option is to run a Fixed schedule and not take advantage of some of these “smart features” that don’t really seem all that smart to me. That would be disappointing.
If you’re using a Flex Monthly schedule, then the schedule is going to adjust based on the monthly averages, not daily. So with a Flex Monthly schedule there is going to be a difference between Jul 31 and Aug 1, simply because of the different months.
Have you tried Flex Daily? It is more fine tuned, which is maybe what you are wanting.
Yes! The seasonal shift data seems to be very flawed for North Texas. Many of us have watering restrictions to water only certain days, so the flex schedule would be no good. I just got my shift notification August 1st and scoffed at it because the heat index was 107 and projected to be similar the entire week. I was able to scroll back to July to reset all of my zones to where they were in July, but will throw off the fall/winter seasonal shift when it actually cools off. I think some more attention needs to be paid to actual weather conditions and not just historical ones, Rachio. Our lawns and landscaping don’t really care what happened years ago.
