There are many threads and posts on this in the past. Are we any closer to the before sunrise schedule feature being fixed? Pretty please. The way it works now is in direct conflict with your much marketed smart flex schedules.
The schedule should not base its start time on a false assumption of every zone needing to run for its max time.
Also +1. I just purchased the Rachio and was extremely disappointed with the poor scheduling as well. It should schedule backwards from the end time as everyone has suggested.
+1 on scheduling needs a major rethink. I’m a little surprised that “disabling” a schedule does not free up that time slot for the user so they can create a new schedule using those zones. I also have some simple schedule option requests such as watering on specific even/odd days (e.g. water on Monday or Tuesday, and Wed or Thursday whichever is even).
There were a few long discussions about this last year. While to us as consumers it appears simple, its apparently not (as a past IT professional, I totally get that!!!)
Here’s the most succinct answer from one of the Rachio really geeky guys:
And the two threads most often referenced last year were:
I’d love to hear from Rachio on their plans here. The silence, when we see them responding to other active threads, makes me hope it’ll be in an upcoming release rather than hasn’t made the cut for attention. It stinks to see the most intelligent schedule suffer such a painful side effect.
I agree with you that it’s old information and I’d love to see it changed. I just posted those links so that the people new to the problem could see that it’s not as simple a solution as we think it is. Like you, I’m hoping that this is on their priority list.
Just to clarify, the approach I posted about last year is no longer a working option. I used to have two schedules, each with ‘end by sunrise’, on odd and even days. I split my zones across the two schedules and achieved reasonable run times for each so that they started at normal times. I tried to remake my schedules last year after further discussions on this topic and found out that you could no longer have two ‘end by’ schedules at all, even if they didn’t conflict on days. So, I would say we have gone backwards.
I get that this is a complex topic, but on it’s surface it would seem to make a lot of people happy if each execution of a given flex/smart cycle schedule started was planned (day before, ignoring last minute skips) to start at the ‘end by’ minus ‘planned run duration’ rather than the fixed start time of ‘end by’ minus ‘potential run duration’.
I just want to throw my support behind getting this fixed. A real pain when I am still in the yard at 8:00 pm and the sprinkles come on. Being in the SW Dev business I can’t believe this is too difficult to correct.
Bill
I agree, I’d hope that rachio could share some sort of high level roadmap. Or at least tell us it won’t be implemented. That’s what we tell our customers.