Watering while raining?

[goblue]

I was a little disappointed this morning because Rachio was watering during the thunderstorm. 0.4 inch of rain had come down before the schedule started to run at 4am. Is it because the forecast was off? Does Rachio stop watering when the forecast changes? Will a rain sensor prevent this from happening?

[Linn]

A rain sensor should stop this.

[franz]

@goblue I’ll do some research today and see what happened at the time flex decided to run. If we had a forecast of .4in of precip in the morning the system should have skipped.

[franz]

@goblue Unfortunately at the time the system ran we didn’t have the precip data. We take an observation and a forecast one hour before the flex schedule and will take the greater of the two precipitation amounts.

In this case the forecast is only showing .05in of precip (precipIN) for today…

http://www.jsoneditoronline.org/?id=ec1385d53479e80e9364782b31e48ed5

and the observation at the time we received the data only showed totalIN of zero precipitation.

http://www.jsoneditoronline.org/?id=a18e22566ae6a31f30df4593626ab863

Currently the observation is showing totalIN .4 inches of precipitation

http://www.jsoneditoronline.org/?id=0c92dfff07fb55050324ce537a2365d6

The .4 inches will be used in deriving any future calculations.

Hope this helps

[plainsane]

Get an external rain sensor to handle these anomalies, they do happen on occasion

[goblue]

@franz Thank you! What time was the 0.4 inch observation first received? The watering did not stop until 6:26 am. It would be nice if Rachio could stop the watering half way when enough precipitation is reported. Also, will a rain sensor interrupt a schedule while it’s running?

[plainsane]

It will prevent the rest of the zones from running once it trips, don’t know about the current zone watering.

[Dub9]

Rachio calculates the water application needs once per day, not continuously. So once it “decided” that it needed to run, the program will run until the next update, the following am. The current rain will not interrupt a program in process (without a rain sensor).

[franz]

@plainsane @Dub9 Current rain will interrupt a schedule if a physical rain sensor is attached.

If a schedule is running we will not stop it if we receive new(er) precipitation data.