I live in NRH, TX the weather in Texas has been extremely SUPER hot that I have noticed my grass turning dormant/brown and the ground showing cracks. I had my Rachio set for Flex Monthly Mon thru Fri as instructed by one of the Rachio reps. I disabled Sat/Sun because those are the days I want to cut the grass, if the temperature permits it. I also set it to water before sunrise.
However, I noticed that it was always watering on Mondays only for a total of almost 2 hours. See image one and two. I recently changed it to water 3 times a week M/W/F to water for 8 mins per zone to see if I can help the grass and ground/trees. I have a total of 6 zones. I really do not know if the first option was the best. To avoid run off water because I have clay, I set some of the zones to steep, see image three. For advanced settings I left it the way the app set it up, see image four.
Any help would be appreciated. Praying for some rain!
At a quick glance, you have root depth at 9". That to me seems excessive. There may we’ll be moisture down at 9", but I very much doubt your grass roots would be down that far.
Secondly, your crop co-efficient seems very low for Super Hot weather. Possibly turn on the new Dynamic option and at least consider a value close to the suggested figure if you don’t want to go with Dynamic (which is based on data that Rachio have for all areas of the world)
Set the root depth to 6" and change the crop co-efficient to at least 75% I reckon. While you are using a PC, if you use a phone app, you should see the Dynamic option
@championc and @NRHTX warm season grass generally have deeper roots and lower crop coefficients than cool weather grass. So a root depth of 9" is probably correct. A crop coefficient of 0.71 is what I have typically seen for warm season grass so 0.75 is close to that. But where did you get the 1.5 for nozzle inches per hour. That seems quite high. I have a Hunter Pgp heads and most of my zones are set to 0.7 for nozzle inches per hour. If your sprinkler heads are not really putting out 1.5 inches per hour than Rachio will think your lawn is getting more water than it really is.
@Alturia Thank you for replying and helping me. To be honest the app set these numbers up on its own. When I went thru the process. I selected Fixed spray head, see image 1.
I set the crop coefficient to 75 and Nozzle per inch 0.7. I had to do for all 6 zones manually. See image 2
I also took a photo of the sprinkler running in the back yard, see image 3
@NRHTX I am guessing that the change you made increased the minutes each zone runs. Now you jusr have to see of the lawn greens up.
BTW I have rotary heads and don’t know anything about the fixed heads you have. You can determine the nozzle inches your heads are putting out by doing a catch cup test, or by measuring using your water meter, or by checking the manufacturer’s specs for the heads you have.
If you have a spare zone, connected to nothing, it’s always worth creating a test zone in it’s own schedule and fixing it with identical parameters. If you then change ONE item, you can see the effects of any changes you makes (without affecting a real zone)
I have exact opposite schedule run times… at first it was saying 1 hr per zone totaling 12 hrs… does that seem right?? I left crop coefficient to be locked and allowing Rachio to adjust that setting… I think I need to bring my run times down?? Bermuda, central Texas, clay loan, restricted to water 1 day a week…
I bumped the in/hr if water the grass gets to 1.75 from 1.5 / hr and that brought the times down… I believe this is higher for me because my psi is at like 55 psi. To house/nozzles. I had the plumbers bump this up because the water pressure wasn’t right.
If I’m at all off here… What else do I need to change? The root depth I have set to 6in… if I increase this number (which I don’t think the roots are deeper than 6) the time goes up obviously… I attached an image after the in/hr change…
Also, zones 6 and 8 are drip line and rotary spray nozzles… Everything else is fixed spray heads.
It shouldn’t increase the duration. Can you delete out your schedule and re-create it. I’ve been seeing some weird things like this too and the recent updates they’ve rolled out seem to have fixed things.
I actually just caught this. Please confirm you have your schedule set with water restrictions, meaning your schedule is only watering one day per week? Are you using a fixed or flex schedule? Please post screenshots of one of the zone settings and advanced settings.
Go to the advanced settings and click reset to default. Then Change your zone settings such as your grass type and nozzle type soil type to something else and then back to what it is. I just copied what your advanced settings are to one of my zones not in use and I’m showing about 23 minutes.
