So I posted these up the other day and someone questioned my graphs, and it got me questioning them myself. I have seen them act this way all season long, so it wasn’t really concerning until @Modawg2k commented.
I have my lawn set to not water on the weekends, since that is when I usually mow. I had thought that might be causing Rachio to struggle in keeping up, but the more I looked at it, the more I realized, it schedules watering long before Allowed Depletion is reached. Is locking the weekends out really the cause of this?
As you can see, it watered Thursday AND Friday, even though it was above Field Capacity. Why? Then per my schedule, it didn’t water over the weekend, and ran two days in a row to “catch up.”
Here is the most recent moisture graph. Again, you can see that it ran Thursday and Friday even though it was above the field capacity. June 10th (Saturday) was a manual run after fertilizing, then we skipped Sunday (per my schedule) and right back at it on Monday even though it was well above AD. This is the first time in probably a month that I am scheduled to skip two days. It is also a first for it to allow itself to come close to the AD threshhold.
Yeah I was going to ask about changes made also. I changed my CC from 0.65 to 0.6 and it retroactively showed previous days as watering up to threshold, when it really didn’t before.
@azdavidr@tmcgahey to my knowledge, flex won’t alter the run time, right? unless it’s some kind of fill up before our 2 days off on the weekend kind of thing. I don’t have any days off so my system never needs to worry about that, but perhaps that’s a built in feature with having set days off
Flex will do that when you have day restrictions. It will water shallower than normal a day before the restricted day if it thinks the Moisture Level will drop too much before the restriction is up (and, I assume, if a full watering will fill the zone too much). A prior thread (from last year) mentioned this and I’ve seen it on mine.
If this is the case, I might have to lift the restriction and see if that affects my mowing. If it doesn’t cause me issues with mowing, I’ll leave it alone and see if it will even out my moisture graphs and in turn make my AD actually work…
@tmcgahey With what @briansusername said, are you married to the mowing the lawn on weekends? How about putting a rain delay on friday night or something. It’s more involved than what you are doing, but things may behave a little bit more normal.
Or, if you water on a saturday, it’s not like the grass will be that wet on a sunday with our heat and bermuda being short anyways
It works great. I have a calendar entry in my google calendar that I repeat every other Saturday when my landscaper is due to come out. If Flex wanted to water on Saturday it just waits until Sunday.
That’s actually what I’m doing now. I mow on Fridays or Saturdays, but I’m not consistent. So I set an alarm on my phone for every Thursday night to remind me to set a rain delay if I am going to mow the next day. It’s more work, but I’d almost always rather push watering out a day rather than shallow water on Thursday - which is fairly likely to happen if I am blocking out Friday and Saturday.
I set up the Google calendar to alert me that I have a rain delay planned. If I decide I don’t need the delay I just move the calendar entry. IFTTT takes care of the rest. It’s easy enough since I use Google calendar for other stuff too.
@briansusername Is correct- if your schedule is restricted on a day, and it projects that it will drop below the AD level, it will do a “top off” to ensure it does’t drop below AD. We don’t see it often, but between the two days restricted and the hot temperatures you can see it in action here!
Awesome. I went ahead and lifted the restrictions to see what happens. Immediately it rescheduled and for the first time in over a month, I actually have 2 days in a row with no watering scheduled…
So I suppose that since I just adjusted my schedule on the 14th to not block weekends, it may take a bit to stabilize, but what’s going on here? Why did I water 3 days in a row, 1 day at 98% capacity, the next to maxed out at 109%?
This makes no sense to me. If it were me, I’d write down all my settings, delete the schedule and set up a new one and see if that straightens things out.
