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!

• Start Time Determined Backwards From Sunrise
• Will "before sunrise" be fixed this year?

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?

@scorp508 If you don’t mind me asking, what home automation do you use? I want to check out how they present this in their app

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 may be 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.

You can do things like: 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 mckynzee on May 12, 2017

@scorp508 I love that IF, AND IF, and THEN statement structure. I guess that may be the engineer in me showing a bit

post by scorp508 on May 12, 2017

Well if you’d like to geek out more it also has OR IF for conditions as well.

post by CountAlmaviva on May 14, 2017

Hi @mckynzee,

I usually like to have my watering cycle end about 1hr before sunrise but other people might prefer different times. Ideally I’d say the app should be able to let the user adjust at what time before sunrise the watering cycle should be completed.

Since Rachio automatically adjusts watering times by season/month, it will make more sense to set a watering cycle completion time, rather than start time. And this completion time before sunrise should be flexible too, since each user will have different preferences.

Hope this makes sense. Have a great day and thanks for forwarding this info to your team. I think this would be a great feature for the app!

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 7:30PM and ran for 173 min. Seems like something is either not working as expected or more likely, I just don’t understand that feature.

Thanks in advance,

Loren Okuly

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 5:31AM which was the forecasted sunrise for our zip code today.

post by lokuly on May 9, 2018

Yes, location is correct:

post by lokuly on May 9, 2018

Oh I bet that is it, looks at total run time and backs that out from sunrise. Since my total run time is 9.5 hours, starting at 7:30 would have finished at 5AM.

Rachio,

Can you confirm? If that’s how it works, maybe we could add that to the feature list. Obviously running at 7:30pm increases the risk of fungus and other things that aren’t good such as not allowing me to play with my two year old boy after work since the sprinklers are on

Seems simple enough, when you make the decision on whether or not to run you estimate total runtime. That’s already in the system today. Seems simple enough to back that run time out from estimated sunrise for the controller’s zip code and then set the start time for that iteration.

My system only runs every zone for full run time once per year, startup. The rest of the year it can probably start early morning after the family has gone to bed and finish just before sunrise which seems more ideal.

post by franz on May 9, 2018

End by sunrise with flex daily is kind of a beast

Here is a better explanation and @theflexdude can answer some questions as to why it is so difficult.

We currently do have to account for all the zones watering in the flex daily schedule.

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 scorp508 on May 9, 2018

I still don’t get this, it feels awkward especially for the “smartest” schedule type.

Our system ran today for the first time this season and watered all 7 zones as expected. The schedule shows it will water only 5 zones on the 11th from 1:53 AM to 3:22 AM. It has decided this 48 hours in advance based on zone settings and forecast. The system knows what a full schedule needs for time if all zones were empty moisture. Let’s call it 210 minutes as an example. I’d expect it to do a recheck of conditions at something like oh maybe 240 minutes before sunrise, validate how many zones need to run, if wind/rain skip is in effect, and then adjust the start time closer to sunrise if fewer than all zones will be run.

It is hard as the consumer to understand this device can do magical voodoo schedule planning weeks in advance, yet also cannot subtract today’s runtime length from today’s sunrise time.

The current logic sort of feels like it’s own worst enemy and preventing the underlying benefit from being fully realized. I am this relatively new feature becomes more logical for us flex daily users in the future.

post by franz on May 9, 2018

Thanks @scorp508, now @theflexdude will not sleep for weeks. I know he wants to revisit this when we have time.

post by johnny2678 on May 10, 2018

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Agree 100%, feels half-done in its current form. It’s not a huge deal since I understand how it works, but I think most new customers will continue to be confused by this feature until it is updated to finish today’s watering by sunrise, instead of the total schedule runtime, which includes time for zones that may not be watered today.

post by toddbecker on May 10, 2018

For now I have created an acceptable workaround for my situation. I split my single Flex Daily schedule in to two, using the odd/even interval days. This moved my start time from about 1:30 am to 3:45 am, getting much closer to sunrise. Luckily I do not have watering restrictions, so this was an option for me.

post by theflexdude on May 10, 2018

I absolutely agree with everything that is brought up. The perfect functionality requires an enormous amount of state for just one schedule type configuration. Limited on time we went with a stable yet imperfect implementation. Once there is time this will definitely be revisited.

post by tdastrup on May 21, 2018

I’m hoping this is revisited sooner rather than later. I’ve had to revert to “Start at a specific time” because “End before sunrise” (which is recommended) starts watering at 11:23 pm and finishes way before sunrise. Now I have mushrooms growing in my yard, which I’m not super thrilled about...

post by tmcgahey on May 29, 2018

But what happens when when all your zones align and all water in one night? You’d still be starting at the same time…how is that any different?

post by tdastrup on May 30, 2018

I manually set the start time for 3am. If they all have to run, I’ll be watering past sunrise. I’d rather water past sunrise than grow a ton of mushrooms.

post by johnny2678 on Jun 9, 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

post by bridavis on Jun 18, 2018

What will be worse is when the fungus starts. The whole point of not watering in the evening is to avoid having the grass wet all night. I split my schedule into two, split by odd/even, and have it stop before 6am.

post by wrfbmf on Jul 9, 2018

I second the need to enhance the app to address this. I ran into this tonight and glad others are talking about it. Add one vote from me.

post by Pesto242 on Jul 21, 2018

I agree the “end by” functions are completely worthless. Only way to get anything close to acceptable requires multiple jumping through hoops to guess and hope it will continue to work.

post by DrTall on Jul 21, 2018

My overall impression (as a first summer Rachio user) is that Flex Daily is not the mode that the average person is intended to use. It seems quirky (such as the bug under discussion here) and the UI is full of stats that don’t pertain to it. My lawn is brown and I am thinking the solution is Flex Monthly not fiddling around with Flex Daily.

post by Slynchrva on Aug 6, 2018

I’ll add my name to the list of the people that would love to see this updated. If I have one or two zones running on Flex Daily, I don’t want it running from 2:20 - 3:24 am. If that subset of my full system needs ~1 hour to run, I think it would be the hour before sunrise. I also would like to see an offset with positive/negative adjustments around the sunrise time.

post by tmcgahey on Aug 7, 2018

It sucks that you feel that way, and I’d argue the opposite…I think the Flex Daily is the driving force behind Rachio, and the other Flex or fixed schedules are there for those that want it, or for the rare cases where flex truly just won’t work (like watering days limited to just 2-3x/week).

post by DrTall on Aug 7, 2018

I dunno, I’m really happy that I switched to Flex Monthly. Now I get emails from Rachio when it adjusts my schedule with an explanation of the change and the rationale.

post by franz on Aug 7, 2018

This is my mission in life

post by KAINtuckyBluegrass on Jun 12, 2019

Any updates on whether calculated time from sunrise will be updated to only use the sum of the zones being run vs all zones? This also causes conflicts with interval rules setup for Flex Daily as a “full” run pushes me back to watering on odd days (restricted by address in my area).

post by JS_racer on Jun 13, 2019

Same question, I resorted to starting at midnight, since the done by sunrise starts at 10pm on the wrong watering day every time, regardless of run time.

post by Romeo345 on Jun 14, 2019

An update would be nice. This is the same issue I’ve been facing since moving to a larger number of zones and a bigger yard.

post by gizbug on May 23, 2021

Has Rachio given up on fixing this issue? Almost seems like it. Brought up in 2018, and have yet to see it fixed (unless I’m missing something).