Hello all. I’m extremely new to having an irrigation system so I don’t have a great grasp of all the pieces yet, so I’m hoping to get some help.
Let me provide some back story as that may help as well.
I built a new home recently, they laid sod on Feb 29th, 2016. The irrigation system at the time was just a Hunter XCore and was schedule to run twice a day for a couple of weeks to get the sod rooted. After it was rooted, I swapped to the Rachio on March 22, 2016.
I first started the Rachio on the Flex, when “As needed” came out, I swapped to that and all seemed well. However, recently my yard has started yellowing (I’m hoping just going dormant and not dying). I decided to swap back to Flexible Daily, but I’m not sure if I have everything setup correctly.
My waterings seem to be predicted as too far apart and I can see that my soil is dry and pulling away from the driveway/foundation some.
I live in the Midwest (Kansas City). I have my soil type set to “Clay Loam”, which I determined using one of the tools suggested by Rachio. I have three schedules setup. One for my front flower bed, one for the front/front side yard and another for the side yard and backyard.
I’m about ready to setup fixed daily schedules to get my yard back to green.
Can anyone help me get moving in the right direction?
Hi, non-expert here with an opinion. Your AW is high because of your soil determination. Your soild type will hold water longer. This means that your frequency of watering will decrease (more days of not watering). What if the soil that your sod is in (as little as it may be) is a diffrent soil type, one that is more absorbing than clay loam. You’ll probably experience drying out on the upper soil level and perhaps that is hurting your new sod. I personally would knock down that AW to increase watering frequency and then adjust with time as your lawn becomes more mature.
I did notice that if I setup a new zone, it defaults AW to .17 and efficiency to 80% now rather than the settings I have now. Do you think that would be a better setup, or should I shoot for a lower AW than .17?
I would definitely knock down the AW to possible even lower than 0.17. You’ll notice that as you knock it down, the number of days between the next run will decrease. Worst case scenario is that if you run it too often, you’ll notice things like mushrooms, water run off, etc. You can easily correct that will increasing your AW. Your sod is still a toddler, doesn’t quite need the intense feedings (waterings) of new sod, but still more care than a mature lawn
Now, I know that we have lots of clay in the Midwest, but should I try changing my soil type to something else? I don’t even see silty loam as an option, which is probably why I went with clay loam.
You can change your soil type around. Just know that the AW numbers associated with the soil types are standardize numbers based off legit data, but your results may vary. Best bet to pick a soil as close as possible and then adjust your AW but a 0.1 here or there based off observations. You can also look into a mason jar test if you want. I did one and it was pretty easily.
And now I’ve been hit by a bug in the system when trying to reset my moisture levels to 0% to force watering for the next day. Instead of going to 0% when clicking “Empty”, it shows that I ran my system today and now it’s 100% full
This won’t really help things out, I’ve already submitted a thread in support category.
