Non-intelligent sprinkler system - change my mind

post by ttueric on Sep 3, 2022

I’ve had my Rachio for about 6 months - all through the summer and spring at least. I’ve determined that it simply isn’t smart enough, no matter how much “hyper weather” data it has, nor the info I’ve put into the system, to actually water my property often enough or long enough to deal with the actual weather conditions. I have actual proof that it is clueless as to what is going on in my yard. I have 5 zones on my lawn and another on a berm of border landscaping plants and trees, and have done a detailed yard map, with the type of grass, the type of sprinkler heads, and the type of soil and slope. I’ve even put in the kind of flow rate the heads have! Today I finally got around to moving two sprinkler heads based on the changes in our property. That necessitated digging up both heads, adding about 12’ of pipe to one of them, digging up the feeder line about 5’ for the other one, and digging new trenches to reposition them. The ONLY place there was any moisture was about 18" around the heads - everywhere else in those trenches was bone dry to the full 12" or more that I dug. See the picture of the longest trench. At the same time, Rachio said the soil moisture in that zone was 95%!!! I ran that zone for 10 mins after that to adjust the throw of the heads and after that it said the moisture was 109% - after only 10 mins. In that time, the heads on that zone (all going about 180-190deg) probably only do about 3-4 full sweeps.

I had to set the berm zone to a fixed setting because it simply didn’t water enough - so poorly that I had bushes starting to lose leaves! And the plants on that berm are 6-8 years established. Right now, the schedule shows NO watering in my lawn for almost two weeks (the blue icons). The green icons are the fixed berm schedule. This is based on “intelligence” that should have told the controller that I’ve had about 0.3" of rain in THREE WEEKS! Sure, there is a forecast of a lot of rain starting today and this coming week - but none has happened yet. There has also been all kinds of forecasted “afternoon showers” - none of which have happened on or around me. Intelligence would build a plan based on what has happened (measured) and is needed, not what might happen. It can be updated as the weather stations tell it rain has come, but it shouldn’t be built on a “might happen” scenario.

And no matter how hyper local its supposed to be, it fails spectacularly in this area. Far too often downpours will happen 1/2 mile from me (even 1/4!), but I’ll stay bone dry. That was the first failure I noticed. So I found a local weather station only about a 1/2 mile from me (in a good direction based on how the rain normally tracks)) that I tied my station to in the app. USUALLY if they get rain I will too, but not always. But the other stations in the area are spread out enough that they could get a downpour and my property would stay dry. That is a normal occurrence in this area with a small mountain ridge running through our area and the TN River and a dammed lake just to the south. I have to wonder if a station on my property would help, but again, with it building plans based on what might be, I have no confidence that would make a difference.

I’d be happy to hear how often the plan is supposed to change, because I don’t see it change much - even after all kinds of forecasted rain that never hits my property. Also, I recently got notified that due to the seasonal changes it had adjusted my schedules. That might be why there is so little watering planned - but if whoever wrote the software doesn’t know that Alabama’s summer does NOT end in August, they need to go back to the drawing board and study weather patterns of the south. We still hit the 90s in September, and are regularly in the 80s, and this is not the time of year when a significant change in the weather pattern happens as it pertains to rain. I’ve looked in the app to find a way to turn off that setting, or change it back, but haven’t yet found it. If anyone knows I’d love to hear!

I’m pretty much to the point where I’ll have to set fixed schedules like my old dumb controller, and just enjoy the app and the ability to remotely control things vs having to go to the garage. But relying on it to keep my property adequately watered has been a spectacular failure this spring and summer.

In case the pics don’t upload, here they are:

post by tmcgahey on Sep 5, 2022

Well, I’ve been on Rachio for almost 6 years in Arizona, and my yard is doing fantastic. You want proof, I’ll take some pictures when I get home. Lush trees with thick foliage. Bushes and shrubs flowering and growing very well, and grass as green as can be. All this running on 2 Rachio controllers, with all zones running flex daily schedules.

post by Eric33432 on Sep 7, 2022

See this thread:

In that thread, I posted this, back in 2020:

I use a 16 zone Gen 2 (with 13 zones being used) and have for a few years.

I live in Palm Beach County, Florida. We water here year round. I get reclaimed water, so never any water use restrictions, and the water is very cheap.

I tried Flex Daily and Flex Monthly. I really tried to make the scheduling systems work, and spent a lot of time to try and understand how they work, asked a lot of questions on this Community, but in the end found it too complicated, and I finally reached the limit of the amount of time I was willing to dedicate to this.

It has been over a year since I gave up, but I remember playing with the settings and watching the zones percentages of saturation, hoping it would water my grass while I watched it turn brown.

I have a Davis Vantage Due weather station, connected to PWS Weather (PWS_Boca33432) with a Meteobridge, which is a considerable investment. So my Rachio has the advantage of knowing exactly the amount of rain I am getting, the temperature, wind speed, the humidity, etc., but I still could not figure out how to configure it to keep my grass green.

Unless you live somewhere where there is no rain, I think having your own weather station where you get the exact weather information probably goes at least half way to the goal of saving water and getting your yard the correct amount of water, even if you are on Fixed schedules.

So for now, my Rachio knows if it rained, the wind speed, and somehow it figures out if it is going to rain in the next 24 hours, usually correctly, all from my Davis weather station, and it usually does not run when not needed.

The other thing I have done is to install drip irrigation on everything that can be watered by a drip line, and kept my spray heads in good shape.

post by ttueric on Sep 10, 2022

Eric, from Eric…thanks. I think you have gone down the rabbit hole that I didn’t want to spend time in. The concept is great, but I believe there are simply too many variables for the system to get this right - especially if it isn’t accurately using soil moisture measurements, actual rainfall data on my property, and real world temperature measurements.

post by championc on Sep 8, 2022

Rachio is completely dependent on ACCURATE DATA. Give it rubbish and it produces rubbish.

That may be in the form of the settings you give it for your zones - the sizes, grass and soil types, the nozzle inches per hour etc …

It’s also dependent on accurate data from a weather station. You are admitting that your neighbours PWS’s are unreliable, so you have little option but to install your own imo.

post by tmcgahey on Sep 13, 2022

The one thing I found was that the Rachio unit, through its results, demonstrated that my settings that I gave it were incorrect. By going and re-checking, I found my error and resolved it. It meant we overwatered last winter.

post by championc on Sep 13, 2022

However, one change I did make was that Rachio was calculating watering times of 20 - 30 mins, and some longer. The old system was 20 mins every 2 days and so I overrode the Rachio calculated timings with 20 mins, which of course increases the frequency that it calculated per zone.