Fixed hourly schedule skipping a watering? - Schedules & Zones / Fixed Schedules - Rachio Community

Fixed hourly schedule skipping a watering?

post by Cazzorno on Sep 23, 2019

Got new grass. I want to water 3 mins each zone, every 4 hrs - total five zones, 15 mins. So I created a Fixed Schedule with the following parameters:

Zones: z1, z2, z4, z5, z6 (zone 3 skipped on purpose)

Times: Start after 7:55 PM

Watering duration: total time 15 min

Start/End dates: Yesterday - Never

Cycle and Soak: none.

So with those values, I would have expected for the schedule to run as follows:

  1. 11:55 AM
  2. 03:55 PM
  3. 07:55 PM
  4. 11:55 PM
  5. 03:55 AM
  6. 07:55 AM

But when I check on the app on iPhone, I have this:

Mon 09/23
New Seeding Schedule - 07:55 PM - 08:10 PM
New Seeding Schedule - 11:55 PM - 12:10 AM
Tuesday 09/24
New Seeding Schedule - 03:55 AM - 04:10 AM
New Seeding Schedule - 07:55 AM - 08:10 AM
New Seeding Schedule - 11:55 AM - 12:10 PM
New Seeding Schedule - 03:55 PM - 04:10 PM
New Seeding Schedule - 07:55 PM - 08:10 PM
Wednesday 09/25
New Seeding Schedule - 03:55 AM - 04:10 AM
New Seeding Schedule - 07:55 AM - 08:10 AM
New Seeding Schedule - 11:55 AM - 12:10 PM
New Seeding Schedule - 03:55 PM - 04:10 PM

See the problem ? on 09/24 - there is only 5 runs. The run that should start 11:55 PM to 12:10 AM is missing. And I chose 07:55 as initial time to check if there was some kind of algorithm issue - I had set it for 08:00 PM (start time) and same issue happened: on 09/23, I had a run for 08:00 PM. On 09/24, 12:00 AM, 04:00 AM, 08:00 AM, 12:00 PM, 04:00 PM, 08:00 PM. Then 09/25 at 04:00 AM, 08:00 AM. Again, the 12:00 AM run on 09/25 was “lost”

I deleted and recreated the schedule multiple times - always the same issue. My controller is a Rachio Gen 3 (8 Zones) running firmware iro3-firmware-hk-5-615.

post by franz on Sep 24, 2019

Could be a defect, I rue the day we built hourly schedules.

A simple fix is to use a fixed schedule with manual cycle/soak. Soak time of 4 hours, cycle time of 3 minutes. In order for it to run 6 times (3 minutes x 6 = 18 minutes) set the zone durations to 18 minutes.