What is up with Rachios Soil Moisture?

[Brien]

@Alturia

@Brien If you don’t want to invest the time and energy needed to set up a flex Daily schedule you may be more satisfied with a flex Monthly or even fixed schedule.

This just sounds dismissive to me. Thanks for the help.

@rraisley

It can only “Just Work” if it’s set up correctly. If your irrigation contractor installed only 4 spray heads in your front yard with 3/8" pipe, and your neighbor had 8 spray heads in the same area with 1/2" pipe, the actual flow to the zone will be quite different. Even with the same type of spray head. Rachio uses an average value for an decent installation. My yard is poorly done, so it would underwater, as would the first example. Rachio can’t know that. You can either make adjustments as you go along, depending on whether you are over- or under-watering (and Rachio tells you how to do that), or you can spend a bit of time to calculate Nozzle Inches per Hour closer.

What Rachio is doing is akin to selling a cruise control to fit any car, from VW Bug to Corvette; The Chevy owner might be able to install it and forget about it, but the Vette owner is probably going to have to calibrate it a bit.

So where would I begin to set this up then? Using Flex Daily, it consistently underwaters my spray zones and overwaters my drip (when first set up, on a system with 4GPH emitters for 2 trees, it defaulted to a FIVE HOUR runtime).