Watering zones under cover

I love the daily flex programmes! However, I have a zone that is under cover and therefore gets no rain. I can’t assign it to a flex watering programme because it always includes precipitation in the daily moisture calculation. Is it possible to suppress the precipitation data from the daily moisture balance calculation in a watering programme?

At present I have the zone controlled by a daily schedule with Weather Intelligence switched on but Climate skip and rain skip switched off. I don’t think this achieves quite what I want since although it should suppress the precipitation data I guess it will also suppress the temperature etc and the adjustments that follow from that. Rather worryingly I am still getting this notification from Rachio:
“Today at 4:10 PM
Hanging baskets and eaves Zone 16 was not skipped since the forecast service observed 0.00 mm and predicted 0.00 mm of precipitation and the total threshold is 3.17 mm”
But I’ve got Climate and Rain skip switched off on this zone so skipping should never have been a possibility…

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Hey @WokingWounded-

Unfortunately, there is no way to just turn off precip readings for a given zone.
However, from the notification you posted, it seems like rain skip is still enabled on your schedule :astonished: Can you double check rain skip is disabled? Maybe post a screenshot too?

McKynzee :rachio:

Rain skip is disabled for this programme

Oh, I also got an email saying that a seasonal adjustment had been made to this watering programme: it watered 6 minutes a day in May and has been changed to 6 minutes a day in June. I suspect this is a bug - notifications are not needed if (I presume) rounding results in an unchanged programme.

I can foresee a useful feature whereas precipitation has an adjustment factor for each zone.
Most zones would work with adjustment factor of 1.0 so 1 inch of rain will result in 1 inch of recorded precipitation.
Under cover zones could use adjustment factor of 0.0 so that no matter how much rain there was, plants will still be watered on schedule.
Zones along the path of runoff (or near a downspout from the roof), could have an adjustment factor greater than 1.0 (such as 1.8 or 3.2…) to account for additional water they would have gotten from other areas of the property.
Zones under partial cover could use a Coverage percentage (40% cover would result in 0.6 as an adjustment factor).

In any case, may be more useful than binary disable switch.

Gene

3 Likes

Terrific idea!

@Gene I love that idea! That is more flexible than just an on/off.

@WokingWounded I’m going to check your account, I’m concerned about you receiving that notification. Also, for the seasonal shift email, I think the issue there is actually your location. Many international customers do not have access to historical weather data. So even if you have seasonal shift enabled, or you use flex monthly schedules, they will not be able to adjust properly due to lack of data :slight_frown:

Hi mckynzee, any progress. I’m still getting a daily message saying
"Hanging baskets and eaves Zone 16 was not skipped since the forecast service observed 0.00 mm and predicted 0.00 mm of precipitation and the total threshold is 3.17 mm" even on days like today and yesterday when I had rain (6mm yesterday and 13.8mm so far today). I think it must be a bug.

Hey @WokingWounded-

I have a test schedule running today at 2 pm (my last test I forgot to turn off the rain skip :rolling_eyes:) so I will keep you updated!

McKynzee :rachio:

Yes a Rain Percentage on a per zone basis would be handy as that was an available figure on the WeatherTrak unit I just replaced.