Ive googled my nut in for the past 30 minutes and cant find any help from Rachio on what their smart controller actually does on the event of a freeze.
Im assuming it reads the temperature off the weather intelligence so it knows when it is freezing… so it should be doing something, right?
You should winterize your sprinklers (google that) and put the Rachio in standby to be safe. That freeze looks like no joke and there’s no controller that’ll protect against freezing, bursting pipes or valves.
If you’re getting a few hours of freezing temps, freeze skip will help if it’s enabled and the weather station you’re using is any good.
https://rachio.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115010540748-Freeze-Skip-FAQ
To my knowledge, Rachio does nothing to protect sprinklers or piping during freezes. I don’t see how it possibly can. Or any system can, for that matter. The only way to really protect them is to winterize your system, which we in SC would never do.
To me, the only reason for Freeze Skip is to not TRY to water when it’s possible that the pipes or heads might be frozen and not work. So the system would /think/ it watered when it didn’t, or some zones would water when others didn’t. Nothing happening when opening valves to a frozen system would hurt things any more than the freezing itself would, IMHO.