Watering Start Time: Automatic Sunrise Adjustment

post by CountAlmaviva on May 11, 2017

Hi Rachio team!

First off, love your product! - Since it’s important to let watering start before sunrise and sunrise time constantly changes throughout the year, it would be great to have an automatic adjustment to the watering start time, where we can select a certain time before sunrise to begin the watering. The app could re-calculate and adjust to start the watering automatically at the desired time before sunrise. This way we won’t have to adjust to the changing sunrise times manually throughout the year. I think this would be a huge time-saver and improvement.

Thanks so much in advance for considering this suggestion for implementation!

post by scorp508 on May 11, 2017

Love it! My home automation system uses daily adjusted sunrise/sunset for various things and this would be a natural evolution.

post by mckynzee on May 12, 2017

I love the idea @CountAlmaviva! I will make sure to get the feedback to the team. How much time do you typically start before sunrise?

post by scorp508 on May 12, 2017

I use HomeSeer 3 Pro. It isn’t the most beautiful to look at, but one of the more powerful and integrates with all kinds of HA technologies. You enter your home’s latitude and longitude to get things like proper sunrise/sunset times that update daily as well as local forecasts.

In the management interface the sunrise/set is always in the top bar just to offer you a reference.

It allows you to run events such as this, each night at sunset I have a set of exterior lights that come on and then a different event turns them off later. I don’t have to think about adjusting any times all year long when in the summer the sun is up at 5 AM and in the winter it is up at maybe 8:45 AM.

HomeSeer uses the idea of “Triggers” and “Conditions” in their events. The sunrise/sunset values are a trigger event you can use before additional conditions are applied.

IF the time is 30 minutes before sunset AND IF Weather Condition @ Location contains Cloudy then turn on exterior lights.

I could envision Rachio adding logic based on the device’s Lat/Long position (or associated weather station) to make sure all watering is done before some particular time of day. Maybe that time is based on sunrise, heat, humidity, solar exposure, if a zone in the lawn doubles as a bus stop, … whatever it may be.

post by lokuly on May 9, 2018

Hi,

So it appears that this feature sort of made it into the latest version. Do you have any details about how it works? I have my schedule set to “End before sunrise”. Yesterday my system turned on at 7:30 PM and ran for 173 min. Seems like something is either not working as expected or more likely, I just don’t understand that feature.

post by scorp508 on May 9, 2018

Is your location set correctly under controller settings?

This morning our Flex Daily with this option enabled watered all zones and ended at 5:31 AM which was the forecasted sunrise for our zip code today. The odd thing with this feature is it doesn’t seem to start closer to sunrise even if it is watering only one or two zones instead of all of them. It appears to always assume the maximum schedule runtime and subtracts it from sunrise.

post by lokuly on May 9, 2018

Yes, location is correct:

post by CountAlmaviva on May 9, 2018

Well, my big question of course, since I was the one suggesting this feature, can I look forward to some royalties now - Just kidding, haha! Thank you so much Rachio team for implementing this into your app! You guys are awesome!

post by johnny2678 on May 10, 2018

@theflexdude - since you guys are looking at this for a future release, I’d love to see an OFFSET option for “finish by sunrise” Ex. so you could finish watering by sunrise - 30 minutes

It would help me evade the sprinkler police that roam the neighborhood in the early AM to make sure we are watering on our assigned days