Hi,
Have two rachios, gen 3s, at a clients house, one seems to reset stations to 3 minutes on its own.
Is this a symptom of a faulty timer the front seems not to do this.
Hate to keep blaming the poor customer.
Have about quite a few timers at various clients homes.
Thank you!
Sully
3 minutes is the default for a quick run. Does client understand the difference between a quick run and scheduled runs?
Thank you!
They do undertsnad the difference.
Its the schedle time itself that changes.
Sully
Can the rachio hardware cause such an issue?
The 3 minute reversion is frustrating.
Thanks
Can’t say that I’ve ever seen it do that. Even “resetting” wouldn’t automatically take it back to 3 minutes.
Hey there, Sully!
I am intrigued by your description of the customer’s issue. I cannot recall encountering another instance of the schedule time resetting to 3 minutes. Outside of manually editing schedule duration, the schedule duration should only change under these circumstances:
While I am certain what could be causing this issue now, I am confident that we can get to the bottom of it. If you have time and are willing would you please DM me the serial number of your customers controllers and I’ll take some time investigate it this week?
Best,
Ours did the same thing. Two identical zones wrt square footage, sprinkler head type and count. One mysteriously changed itself from whatever it’d been at to three minutes. See: Reaching The End Of My Patience With Our Rachio 3
I may find myself looking for something different, next season. This controller’s wonkiness has become tiring.
I really wish they’d allow one to turn off much of the “smarts” and provide an option to adjust all zones up/down by a percentage amount. Both of our previous controllers had that feature. It was very handy. With the Rachio 3 I’m obliged to manually adjust all of them, all freakin’ eight of them, individually, as conditions change.
Hi Dane,
Thank you for the response!
First here are the serial numbers, see attachment:
Second, to respond to your circumstances.
-we try to set the clock for fixed only, no Flex. This timer is used for simplicity of access by owners and not it’s algorythems, except the rain off function. Seek to avoid any seasonal shift change and set it for that purpose. Also, why would a seasonal shift watering 20 or 45 minutes downshift to 3 minutes?
-advanced settings usually only used by me during set up.
-adding or removing days would change only one station and by 90%?
Adding or removing days from a program should not change a single station of several on a program? At least it doesn’t on the 25 or so others I help users with.
I have the customer trying to stay observant with the clocks only online, to separate from the equation accidental taps on small phones.
Appreciate the help to assist these clients!
Spent much time, and they are quite willing, to figure this out, but the sudden shifts are disconcerting especially in the recent heat waves, when seasonal shifts of this sort are catastrophic.
Best,
Sully
Hey Sully,
Thank you for providing me with the serial numbers. I will investigate the schedule settings and update you in this by the end of the week. Let me know if there is more of sense of urgency from your client and I’ll try to fit it into my scheduler sooner (I’ll try to do that anyways).
Just to clear up any confusion on my bullet points, I was just outlining the situations that might change duration outside of directly editing the duration. If none of those situations are true, the watering duration should not change. So, I am very curious to determine what is causing your customer’s duration adjustments.
Thank you Dane!
I think I understood your bullet points, when resetting some baseline settings, time can be reset.
Customer can be patient now that’s it’s cooler, but they are beginning to question Rachio and asked about other timers, so soonish is good.
They will run the timers just from their computers to see if the app is part of a problem human caused or otherwise.
Best,
Greg Sullivan
310 562 3268
Landscape Architect
Boething Treeland Nursery
I blocked some time off to investigate this tomorrow.
Thank you Dane!
Best,
Greg Sullivan
310 562 3268
Landscape Architect
Boething Treeland Nursery
Hi Sully,
I reviewed the server logs and it looks like that duration change to 3 minutes occurred on 09/20 and was done by a user on an iOS app. I sent you a DM with a little more details including a screenshot of the server logs.
Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Best,
I can’t speak to Sully’s customers case, but I know nobody here did that when it happened to our timer. It takes several “button pushes” to get to a place you can do that. That’s not something I’d be inclined to forget, even were I likely to do it, and I know darn well my wife didn’t do it. I don’t think she even knows where to go or how to get there to do that.
The only manual things either of us do is occasionally do a 3-minute (or whatever) quick run.
I have had nearly the identical problem. Unbeknownst to me, and after the app spontaneously set Zone 1 from its intended setting of 35 minutes to 4 minutes. I only discovered this when the zone dried up over time. Days after fixing it, I found that Zone 5 had subsequently then reset itself to 4 minutes. The first time this happened, I accepted that this may been user error, even though I thought it was very unlikely. The second time it happened, and after being very careful with my settings, I can only ascribe this to a system error. I would encourage the engineers at Rachio to take our experiences seriously and look for possible system-level causes of this problem. I will add one data point to the root cause investigation: for both zones in quesiton, I had performed short quick runs of short duration. Could it be possible that these quick runs corrupted the data table for the normal zone durations? I don’t know, but it is a possibility worth checking.