I am the proud new owner of Rachio 3! I set up the zones and created a flex daily schedule. I pretty much accepted the defaults on everything being new. When I check the calendar it appears to be sound other than the zone for my backyard lawn. It is scheduled to be watered every single day. This does not seem right to me and I don’t want my lawn watered daily.
My front yard lawn seems fine and my backyard side lawn seems fine. My zone for annuals is being watered daily but that seems to be expected.
@LawnCrazy - it is probably a setting. Post pictures of the zone setting in question and I’m sure someone will chime in. Soil type, precipitation rate, root depth or plant type settings that are not accurate can result in this situation.
Couple of things. It’s sometime beneficial to start with a zone or two on flex daily and see how they behave, then roll out to other zones. For your zone it looks like you adjusted the root zone depth (which defaults to 9 inches!) and could probably use a different soil type (loam?). If you set those values you should see about an every 5-7 days watering.
Two of the zones have Hunter I-20 4” pop up rotors. One has Rainbird 1804-van.
I adjusted the root depth so the colander seems better now. I would like to dial in the in/hr but it’s confusing. The manufactures don’t seem to give the same specifications as what is asked for.
So with the I-20’s, there are a bunch of different nozzles available with widely different precipitation rates ranging from .27" to 1.29". Do you happen to know what type of nozzles you have in those rotor bodies? If you don’t, it might be a good idea to do a catch cup test to see what type of PR you are actually putting down, but chances are, it’s not the default 1" in Rachio,
As for the Rainbird’s, the VAN’s can range as much as .50" PR depending on the throw of the sprinkler and sprinkler layout. You could assume an average based on the chart to get you much closer than the default 1" in Rachio, and then fine tune based on what you see in the zone, or do a catch cup test. I’d set this zone somewhere in the 1.75"/h range and see how it does.
On the zone with the Rainbird VAN’s yes. It would be a good starting point.
However…if you have the Blue 3.0, they only put out an average of about .45"/hour out, so once you adjust that down from the 1" currently set up, the run times will actually go longer…
But, with Rachio comes a little bit of a learning curve. Most people don’t water correctly and end up watering way too frequently, for very short times. It’s better to water less frequently, so longer. So, even though the times seem long, it might only water once a week instead of every couple days.