Water usage Estimates

I just installed the Rachio 1, and it ran ONCE, and told me I used 850 Gallons.
That seems VERY HIGH to me.
I looked on these message boards and OTHER people are reporting the same number 850 Gallons used,
so is that just a quick and dirty ballpark , as the other people and I coincidentally used EXACTLY the same 850 gallons.
The whole point of this unit is to reduce water usage so If i cannot trust the estimates its kind of not helpful.
Thanks,
Todd

It is an estimate. Make sure your head flow rate is correct and the square footage for the zone is correct.

Yes, that :wink:

This should also help

:cheers:

I would suggest double checking the value w/ your actual water meter. Run a cycle for 1-2 minutes and measure the actual usage at the meter.

If your counting on reasonable accuracy it would be good to verify the numbers.

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@todd, if you’d like to reset your gallon reports after you have a chance to adjust your square footage and PR by zone, feel free to email the support team (support@rachio.com) and they’d be happy to help :smile:

Let us know if you have any questions on our estimated flow calculations moving forward.

How do you account for the number of sprinkler heads installed in a zone? I would assume it makes a big difference if I have 1 or 5 sprinkler heads installed in my zone. Is there a specific calculation you are doing as how many sprinkler heads might be installed for a specific area size?

Also it depends if you have the nozzle fully open or not. I guess this is where we should start doing the cup test. But again, how much does that help if Rachio does not know how many sprinkler heads I have?

Last but not least there might be different nozzles within the same zone. How do we best accommodate for all of that?

As long as we know the precipitation in/hr, nozzle efficiency, then # of heads does not matter.

This thread has more information on the catch cup test.

If you want to go for black belt status, this calculator will help determining in/hr, efficiency etc.

You will need some catch cups though…

The more accurate in/hr (you can create custom nozzles in our app), the better we can build schedules, etc.

:cheers: