AWC vs CEC - Schedules & Zones / Set Up & Edit Zones - Rachio Community

AWC vs CEC

post by spaceman_spiff on Jun 24, 2022

I’ve done a bunch of googling and haven’t really found much about this. Admittedly, this is a pretty advanced topic, but I’m an engineer and I like endlessly tinkering with things, my Rachio settings included.

I have 3 lawn zones and are set up as:

I recently received a soil analysis on all 3 of my lawn zones.

For CEC, my 3 zones show:

After reading this article about CEC ( https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/what_is_your_soil_cation_exchange_capacity), it got me thinking. It basically states that soils with low CEC don’t hold onto anything , nutrients or water, very easily.

Right now, my front yard (highest CEC) is still all completely green at this point in the California summer, even the portions that get 7-9 hours of sun per day. My back yard (mid CEC) is green in the shady areas, and green/brown in the sunny areas. My pool area has the lowest CEC out of the 3 zones, and easily contains the most brown/dormant grass of the 3.

Since lower CEC soils don’t hold water as easily, does it make sense to drop my AWC of my back yard zone a bit, and my pool zone a decent amount, to try to counter-act this? It’s still putting down the same amount of water per week, but does so less at one time, but more frequently. If I’m dropping 0.18 in/in of water on my pool zone, wouldn’t a low CEC mean that a portion of that is wasted since trickles below the grass root zone quicker than a higher-CEC zone?

Notes: