Tracking Non Connected Soaker Hose Zone

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This may be an odd question.

We have 11 zones attached to our system. We also have two sides of the property now lines with arborvaties (about 70+ in total). Each summer we have a soaker hose attached to the hose spigots and have a little device that lets you set it to run for say an hour every few days.

Ideally of course we would setup new zones to these locations and let Rachio run its magic. Aside from that being a lot of work that isn’t in the cards right now, one side would require us running lines under the driveway or such so not an option currently.

So my question is, can I create new zones in Rachio for these two drip zones and set them up as Daily Flex. But since they are not actually attached to hoses just use Rachio for those two zones to let me know when and for how long I should run them each week? So that is I would have to manually turn on the houses for those 2 zones, but would be nice to at least know exactly when based on Rachio’s data intelligence. Is something like this possible, or maybe I’m over thinking this.

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Hey @ChrisC!

You can absolutely set up these zones and create a flex schedule, and then just water according to what flex recommends. Just make sure the “dummy” zones you create don’t have your other zone wires in them :wink: What little device are you using to activate the spigots? Any chance it’s internet connected/integrated with IFTTT? There could be some cool possibilities there…

McKynzee :rachio:

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Wonderful, thank you! I was hoping it would work that way, but figured I’d ask here first to make sure there was no “gotchas” in regards to using zones that aren’t actually wired up. With that confidence now, I’ll give it a whirl this weekend.

I use IFTTT for various things, but didn’t consider using it for this issue. Good idea. Right now just using the the common orbit timer that’s the number one on amazon (not wifi or anything). I just did a search and see a few connected spigot timers such as Melnor RainCloud, RainRobot, and Gnome. While not an extensive search, none seem to support IFTTT, unless you know that one does?

Otherwise will stick with the Orbit, and eventually will go through the work of possibily hooking up the soakers to the Rachio. Thank you!

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I don’t know of any off the top of my head… but I can do a quick check :wink: Let us know how it goes!