In the early evening of 5/2, we had a rain storm come through our area. I have a PWS that we use for weather info, and it had registered .22 inches prior to the Flex Daily scheduled run at 9:14 PM, and .61 inches overall. The controller hadn’t changed the schedule, so I double checked that the PWS was reporting in properly and it was - I could see the precipitation total by going to the weather station via the Rachio app. It had reached .22 inches by 8:20 PM and was continuing to rain at the time the sprinklers were scheduled to run. I let it go all the way until 9:14 without cancelling manually because I thought maybe it would catch it at that time. Nope - the sprinklers turned on as we were still in the middle of a downpour, so I ended up manually stopping the schedule.
I assumed the PWS was the problem, but everything looks good and the data had reported in quickly so there was no delay in data. This morning (5/3) it did skip today’s watering due to the rain last night, so I know the Rachio is kind of working. I just don’t understand why it wouldn’t have stopped last night’s watering since it had rained plenty prior to the schedule starting.
Assuming that Wx station is selected for Rachio, You may have run into the case where the day’s expected or forecasted rain wasn’t enough to fill your zone’s soil moisture balance so it watered anyway. Check the soil moisture table and chart to find what happened. The table has a water balance table that includes irrigation and precipitation amounts. Today’s entry can be forecasted or actual measured values, future dates are forecasted, past dates are measured. You can see more forecasted values by clicking > at the right edge of the chart,
One last thing- Flex doesn’t “rain skip” but uses soil moisture balance. So conceivably it would correctly water despite rain happening the same day because you lacked soil moisture. Fixed schedules can have a hard rainskip threshold that doesn’t care about soil moisture.
Thanks for the responses! Yeah I know - I just meant rain skip in the sense that it wouldn’t water. I did check the moisture balance prior to it running last night and it was at 100% before 9:14 PM. I wonder if the Rachio folks can see more detail in their end to determine the reason it still wanted to run. It’s almost like it didn’t re-assess the moisture balance again before running.
