We had an incredible soaking yesterday. Torrential rain for quite a while. This morning I woke up and found that my sprinklers ran. What? I was thinking of turning on Standby Mode after the rainstorm, but usually, Rachio does a great job and knows not to run the next day. I also have a rain gauge which should have still been soaked. I have all the items in Weather Intelligence checked. Not sure what happened. Any ideas?
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Do you have Rachio pointed to a specific PWS or are you using WI+? Can you confirm that the system saw the same rain you did?
If the rain gauge is installed correctly and functioning, that should have bypassed anything with weather intelligence, so it makes me think the rain gauge isn’t working correctly.
How does this work for schedules other than Flex Daily?
I know they have a Rain Skip: For what period after the rain does it skip? I was thinking only the same day?
How is rainfall considered with Flex Monthly and Fixed other than Rain Skip?
The weather station shows 9.7 miles away. I guess it is possible that the storm we got was isolated to our immediate area. Not sure how to check the rain sensor. I know it used to work. It is one of those wireless sensors with a receive next to the Rachio and connected to the S1 terminal.
We had one of those come through here last night. Poured buckets. But only for a short while and, from the looks of the radar, probably didn’t hit a mile south of us.
As intense as it was, it did not rain enough to trigger our rain sensor. (Ours is a hard-wired Hunter Mini-Clik.)
The Rachio 3 app will tell you, both on the “Home” page and in the log (More → History) when the rain sensor has been activated/deactivated.
If it’s a wireless sensor and it’s not working anymore, could be the battery in the transmitter is toast.
Btw: “Rain gauge” ≠“rain sensor”. They are two entirely different things. Suggest you edit your OP to indicate what it is you really have.
I have an Orbit RX-2 sensor. I just looked at it and noticed that the switch on the bottom was turned to OFF. (left = rain, middle = off, right = freeze). Oh well, that might explain it I will have to test it some. I looked in the history and I do not see any entries for rain sensor triggered,
When the sensor is wet, it basically puts Rachio into a standby mode so no schedules can run. Once the sensor dries out, schedules resume. This could take a 2-5 days depending on the amount. I don’t know of one that measures amount of rain, just the presence of rain.
No, I was referring to using a PWS and Weather Intelligence. Rain Skip works with Flex Monthly and Fixed schedules, but I didn’t think a skip today (no matter the rain) would skip tomorrow. And I thought only Flex Daily actually used the PWS values (except just that it exceeded the set value or not).
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Sorry, missed your question.
I think you are correct, anything other than Flex Daily will just look to the PWS for presence of rain (over/above set threshold). I’m not sure how long the rain skip lasts for a fixed schedule since I haven’t had a fixed schedule for over 5 years. My assumption would be that it picked back up on the next scheduled day.
Looks like my rain sensor bit the dust. I need a new one. The receiver unit looks ok, but I’m not sure I can just buy the sensor part. I will create another post asking for recommendations on a new sensor unit. Thanks for your help everyone.
I think a PWS is a superior solution. It costs more, but if you are in a region where water is expensive, the cost may easily be recouped.
@jseymour , see if you can find a reliable PWS closer to you. By reliable, I mean check to see that it’s recording precipitation that looks reasonable to what you are seeing. I used to use a couple of different ones that were 1-1.5 miles from my house. Finally got my own so that I could monitor it’s reliability (plus it’s just fun for me to have one).
@Linn, I plan to. We once had a PWS, but the sensors all died, one-by-one.
What I want to get is an Ambient WS-5000, but they’re out-of-stock everywhere.
I use the closest PWS 0.12 miles away in the Rachio Wunderground database. It has been way more accurate than the default Weather Network since I switched to it a few weeks ago and the rainfall was the same as my house. I wanted a very close location with high accuracy during the Arizona Monsoon.
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We too had a huge soaking from Elsa- 6 inches of rain by my rain gauge! Yet the soil moisture a day and a half later is from 53 to 94 % moisture - mostly around 70%. Seems hard to believe.
6" of rain don’t all end up in the root zone. Much will run off, some will go deeper.
One thing I’ve noticed is that Rachio doesn’t do well when you have a “super” saturated event. It doesn’t happen often, so in this case I normally go in and mark all the zones “FILL” for a day or two. Unfortunately, you have to do each zone individually. I’m hoping that same day they will give us the option to mark all zones “FILL”. I will just keep an eye on things to see if I still see it really wet on the surface, because you really don’t know how much runs off in these events.
As an aside, years back they used to use 120% instead of 110% which worked better for these supersaturation events, but didn’t work as well on a regular basis.
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Reviving an older thread…
I had a similar problem last night. Between 2:30 and 3:30 AM my weather station recorded 0.8 in. of rain. One of my zones ran at 4:22 AM. The program is Flex Daily; it doesn’t look like my weather station was off-line at any time in the previous 24 hours, and my drip line zone was skipped this morning.
In looking at the program details there is no longer an option for Rain Skip, just wind and freeze.
Have I missed something in my setup (not likely since I have been using this program for several years now)? Has the Rain Skip option been removed from the Flex Daily program?
Any help on getting this fixed would be appreciated.
If you are on Flex Daily, there isn’t a rain skip option because flex doesn’t really skip for rain, it adjusts according to forecasted or actual rain.
My hypothesis, you have a schedule that is set to end by sunrise. Since end by sunrise doesn’t work exactly how you’d expect, the actual schedule start was before the rain, or before Rachio checked (I believe it is 1 hour prior to scheduled run) for rain or forecasted rain.
I’d read about issues with the “end by sunrise” option so I have it set up to end by 5:30 AM instead.
I did just recheck my history. The zone did start to run at 3:30 AM, went into a soak cycle, and restarted at 4:22. If it checked an hour before the scheduled run, at 2:30, there was no recorded rain then. That would explain what happened.
Thanks, you helped me figure this out!
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