Just curious, when should I expect to begin seeing water savings being reported? Can you explain how this feature works and what I should be seeing. Right now, mine still shows zero savings. I have to think that it is significant savings in comparison to to my old Rainbird scheduling which used to run every few days unless the Rain sensor delay occurred. Is there anything I need to do to activate this?
I believe Rachio only considers water saved due to rain. That is, the amount of water it would have spent but didn’t because there was precipitation.
I wonder if we might suggest an improvement of some sort, though. Other measures of water savings might be interesting but of course we’d want to decide what those savings would be relative to.
I have yet to figure out the water savings feature. Water savings against what? Mine is always zero. The idea I have is to manually input last year’s monthly water use, removing the estimated indoor use. It is really easy if you have a dedicated sprinkler meter. Rachio, could you do something like this?
If you are using Flex Daily, I don’t think you will ever see any “savings” as there’s no way for Rachio to compute a baseline. Rather, the “savings” info is derived from the other kind of schedules with and without the weather intellegince option enabled.
At least I think that’s the way it works.
Steve.
I wish Rachio would clarify.
Yeah I remember seeing something about flex not showing savings. Here’s last year and this year showing no savings whatsoever
From Franz last year:
He references this thread which has some comments from both Franz and Emil in it:
Our local water authority publishes a biweekly chart of suggested watering durations for dumb systems. If I could get a sensible report out of Rachio showing duration by zone when using Flex I could claim anything less than the official chart as a savings. Right now I can’t get an accurate report of duration by zone by period.
Jumping it to further clarify-
We determine “Water Saved” by adding up any runs that are skipped due to Weather Intelligence features (ie Rain Skip, Freeze Skip, Climate Skip). Since flex scheduling doesn’t necessarily skip (I would call it more of a push), this feature is not available on Flex schedules.
I think ultimately the best comparison is comparing “pre-Rachio” water usage to “post-Rachio”. I love seeing YOY water bills for this exact reason. However, it would be difficult to capture your pre Rachio watering habits. Any thoughts/ideas?
McKynzee
FYI - We get YOY water usage graphs from our local water authority. It has issues because of things like someone in 2014 opening a garden tap when we were away. And a recent underground break in our irrigation line.
Rachio could provide a feature allowing users to enter typical historical usage and report savings going forward. That would be useful.
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