Skipping watering due to freezing temperatures

Hi,
I am quite new to Rachio but quite happy with it.
I own generation 3 and live in Europe.

My problem is that frequently, Rachio skips the watering claiming that there is a temperature below 5°C, but looking at the forecast displayed inside the Rachio app, the temperature is well above the one claimed by Rachio.

Example (April 2nd: temeratures between 7°C and 12°C, and actually that was the temperature on that day, but the schedule skipped claiming that the forecast temperature was 2°C):

I have other days with the same behavior.

Can someone explains why this is happening?

The forecast is based on hourly, and there is a chance of it being slightly off. I also don’t know how accurate our European weather is. If you adjust your temperature skip degrees up it could help with these false positives.

:cheers:

Hi @franz,
thanks for your reply.
I am not sure I understood your explanation and the algorithm behind the forecast and the skip.

Resuming, in the app the forecast was minimum 7°C and the actual minimum temperature (measured with a PWS connected to weatherunderground) was 5.9°C (see attachment).
So there shouldn’t have been any skip.

Your suggestion of lowering the threshold, is suggesting to water the garden at a temperature below 5°C, that is wrong.
And as the app calculated a temperature of 2°C, in my setup I should set a threshold of 1°C, that is of course a wrong way of solving the problem.

Can you help find out what the problem is?

29

Sorry, I meant increasing the minimum. We use hourly forecasts based on lat/long to determine skips.

These hourly forecasts will not always match up with PWS readings.

:cheers:

Hi Franz,
I still don’t understand your answer.
If I increase the minimum, then the problem will be worse.
I set a minimum of 5°, and Rachio skipped the watering due to a freezing of 2°C while the forecast was 7°C… Please explain better, thanks.

Where do you get your hourly forecast from? Which weather site?