Hello all,
New user here, saw the Rachio product at Home Depot a few weeks back and had to pick one up. The fact that it’s a Denver based company also was great as we like to support the local businesses.
I read a few threads on the community but I was curious if anyone had just a general suggestion to our typical sprinkler type in our yard. We have a rather small yard so all that is installed are RainBird series 1800 sprinklers. Just curious if the best out of box nozzle type would be the Fixed Spray Head nozzle type?
Definitely appreciate any guidance from the community.
Thank you,
Matt
Hi @forza1976, thanks for reaching out. We appreciate your support!
The RainBird 1800 Series Spray head is a ‘Fixed Spray Head’ within the Rachio app. Pending the spray nozzle the 1800 base has installed, the precip rate can very. The ‘Fixed Spray Head’ will provide a good ballpark application rate for you to get started, but to refine the precip rate, if you could tell us the nozzle code, found on the top of the nozzle, I’d be happy to lookup the exact application rate for you.
Hello Emil,
Thank you for the help. I apologize but we seem to have a bit of a hodgepodge of sprinklers in our 4 zones. If this is too much research I understand but if you can provide the details that would be awesome. Or based upon what you see if there is a specific configuration for a custom nozzle that I should use per zone, that works great as well.
Please excuse my delayed response. I’ve been offline the last two days with a bad case of the flu. I’ll do some digging into your nozzles and precip rates.
This number is a direct reflection to the nozzle selection and square footage of the zone. To fine tune it, we’ll need to setup custom nozzles for each zone (provided that none of the defaults are close) and also update the square footage of the zone from your advanced settings menu within each zone.
While I research your nozzles, if you can gather the square footage of each zone, that would be great!
Below are the listed precip rates for each nozzle for zones 1 and 2:
Zone 1:
Pro 10A – 1.89 in/hour to 2.18 in/hour
Zone 2:
Rainbird 4VAN x2 – 4.93 in/hour to 11.86 in/hour
Rainbird 80 – need more info or photo of head and nozzle.
Rainbird 120 – need more info or photo of head and nozzle.
Rainbird 12H – 1.74 in/hour to 2.47 in/hour
Rainbird 15VAN – 1.58 in/hour to 2.39 in/hour
As you can see, the precip rates can vary greatly from one nozzle to another. Chane you have multiple heads on each zone, I think the best way to get an accurate reading would be to do a catch cup test, then create a custom nozzle with the data collected. We can certainly attempt to find the average precip rate of the nozzles listed, but this doesn’t take into effect your system’s pressure, flow rate, or distribution uniformity – all of which play a key role in how accurate your Iro’s reporting and watering schedules will be.
As for your zone square footage updates
If you haven’t yet created a new watering time since saving this updates, I’d recommend doing so as the watering times are static to the original zone settings and do not dynamically adjust.
I hope this helps shed some light into the calibration possibilities of your zones. It’s always recommended to calibrate the Iro with the best data possible for the algorithms to work better. That said, once you have a chance to double check your nozzle output, I’d recommend getting (or borrowing) a soil probe to take a few measurements of your root zone depths as well.
Hope this helps. Happy to provide more feedback and/or answer additional questions if you have any.
Thank you @emil
I haven’t had a chance to make any adjustments based upon your research and suggestions above. I wanted to say thanks for the information and I plan on making some updates this week.
You’re very welcome, thanks for the kind words. I’ve been researching nozzles and will be working with the dev team to make some updates to our current process to make it easier to understand.
To make the custom nozzles more accurate, we’ll need to know the number of heads per zone. If you have a ballpark of these numbers, feel free to reply back with the counts here.
If you ever need any help, please email our support team [support@rachio.com, c/o Emil] and we can review your account in detail.
