I agree. But in the Android world with so many different phone manufacturers and launchers I think it is hard for the app designers to handle everything or know how the app will actually work on all phones. I’ve had other apps not update until you swipe down so have gotten in the habit of trying that when I run across something weird or unusual in an app.
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I clicked on the push notification and it took me to the app. It may have been running in the background from when I looked at it last night. It needs to refresh whenever going through the push notification and when switching from another page to the irrigation page.
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I’m anal about closing out apps a few times a day in order to keep my phone running a little faster and for battery life (I’d say I’m a power user on my phone due to work), so rarely are any apps still open in the background when I go to use them. Rachio always updates the zones when you FIRST open the app, so I’ve never noticed this issue…
That one is a major addition needed. It also needs arrows like the web applet to indicate that you can page left or right through the moisture table. Up until this past week, I solely used the Android app or IOS app(rare) to access the program.
All of this jumping around makes me feel(and look) like a newbie that has never used the Rachio before.
Hey, not an expert or anything here… but does the amount of shade matter in this? I am just noting that there has been no discussion of it, and I would think that it might affect the evapot…rate (don’t remember the exact word). I’m mentioning this because there is one zone that I just set up as flex daily that seems to be going a long time between waterings, BUT it is also my only zone that is in shade almost all day (I think it gets like 2 hours of sun!). And I was pretty shocked when I decided to actually check how much sun my zones get that they are actually a lot more shaded than I thought. This might be the opposite situation… someone thinking they have more shade than they actually do?
Shade for sure affects things. I’ve never been able to quantify how much it affects things in Rachio, but it will change the way a zone reacts, all other things being equal.
Evapotranspiration is the word you are looking for. ET for short! 
My issue in my lawn is that I have a couple zones that have mixed shade, half full sun, and half darn near full shade. For one, I always struggle with Bermuda growing in full shade, but I also have to error on the side of what needs most, and so the shaded areas do get a bit oversaturated at times, but it is what is needed for the full sun areas. In a perfect world, they would have planned for this when the system was installed and broken the zone up somewhere near the treeline, but it is what it is now.
Thanks.
I have the same issue with half-shade/half-sun. If that weren’t bad enough, the shaded area is also downslope from the sunny area, so it also gets more water from the inevitable runoff. Can’t something like this be remedied by installing higher-flow heads on the sunny side (or lower-flow heads on the shady side) and then setting the zone’s sun exposure setting to compensate?
As tmcgahey said, the amount of sun or shade is taken into account for the ET setting. Set up two identical zones, one in full shade, the other in full sun, you will find a difference in the ET setting (only)
That’s actually a great idea. It would lower the efficiency, but put more water where you want it and less elsewhere. It might overcompensate in cloudy weather, but it does sound like something worth doing.
Could you explain what you mean by “lower the efficiency”?
Yeah, I knew I should have said more about it. In the Rachio Advanced settings for each zone is an Efficiency setting. Normally, I would have expected say a 70% efficiency to mean that 70% of the water gets to the lawn, with 30% lost due to evaporation, but that’s not the case here. Efficiency is defined by the Catch Cup formulas, and is the average flow of the lowest 1/4 of the cups measured in a zone divided by the average flow of all the cups. Then there’s a more complicated formula that adds more time to the zone’s irrigation to help compensate for the low efficiency (by overwatering the rest to help out the lowest). Normally, a high efficiency is desired, saving water and giving a more even watering result on the lawn.
If, as was suggested, higher water flow heads are placed in sunny areas, and lower in shaded areas, you are actually /creating/ differences in the water application, lowering the efficiency. Normally a bad thing, but in this case you’re doing it on purpose, so not a bad thing.
Hope this helps.
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Can I just check something with you experts - how do connected rain sensors work with the Rachio3 ? Do they cause the controller to ignore the rain from a PWS or does it co-exist with one ? Does on improve the decision making of the controller ?
He called us experts! 
You can wire a rain sensor into Rachio by connecting to the sensor ports (wiring varies slightly by make/model), and letting Rachio know it is there in the settings. When the sensor shows rain, it basically puts the system in a standby mode until the sensor dries out, and normal watering continues, but it doesn’t really change the way it waters. It can work in conjunction with PWS to give you better accuracy of rainfall at your house, rather than a PWS down the street. Just make sure you maintain it…
Thanks for that. I didn’t want to rely on some 3rd party to provide our data, so we installed our own PWS. Our next nearest was about 2km away and higher, and I have seen decent differences in the weather recorded,
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He ought to be playing at the Comedy Club! 
Well in all honesty, you guys are. You have a deep understanding of the options and advanced settings and know how the system behaves (through personal experience and logic and knowledge). I bet there hasn’t been a single post on here which has defied all logic. It seems to me that there is always a good reason for the controllers’ behaviour in all situations, with unexpected behaviour due to user misconfiguration due to misunderstanding, or due to 3rd party PWS’s being either offline or spitting out errorous or unexpected data.
Just getting to read this thread today and wanted to add my two cents on PWS’s (I’m away from home for a month babysitting a new grandchild). I installed my own PWS so that I could keep track of things a little better. Occasionally it starts recording a precipitation for the day of 83886.07 inches. I had it working fine, left for
Texas, and a day later it started recording this again! All the every few minute recordings of precipitation on WeatherUnderground are correct, it’s just the daily totals that get changed to 83886.07, and that is what Rachio uses. So I had to change to another PWS until I get back home. This is something that Rachio can’t pick up, as it looks to Rachio like the weather station is working correctly. So, @garyjnj1, something funky may have happened to the weather station that worked so well for you these past years. Just glad to see that you are starting to make some progress.
But the rain sensor should change the way it waters. My Rain Bird water sensor has an inches of water setting that can be used to set how much precipitation is allowed before it activates. Rachio should be able to allow users to input that value so that whenever it triggers at a minimum, it knows that the soil received that much water. It can then compare that value with the value reported by the weather station and throw out the lower of the two values. Sort of like using the sensor as a check and balance to the reporting weather station value. This should be a configurable (off/on) feature.
A bug I noticed today is that if a program is running and you disable the zone in the program, the disabled zone does not get removed from the already running program. You have wait until the the program gets to that zone that was disabled and manually skip it each time that zone starts.
I disabled my zone 5 and 6 and Rachio did not remove it from the already running schedule. So I had to wait until any desired zones completed for it to get to the undesired zones and force the skip:
Irrigation Page(5/6 disabled)
Up Next Schedule Page still has deleted zones
Zones Run Anyway
