Watering Start Time: Automatic Sunrise Adjustment - Schedules & Zones / Create & Edit Schedules - Rachio Community
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!
Have a great day and best regards from Dallas, Texas.
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 is 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 an 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.
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 a 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 mckynzee on May 15, 2017
Super helpful @CountAlmaviva, I appreciate the extra insight!
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.
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.
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 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 🙁
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. It also has tentative custom schedules for the 17th and 18th.
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 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
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 😉
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 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. Please make this function actually work to end at a time specified and be able to calculate based on only the zones that run.
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. It feels like Flex Daily is an afterthought in the product.
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. My trees and grass look better and are probably healthier than they ever were on my Hunter Pro-C clock. It took a while to fill Rachio with the correct information for my soil, nozzle PR, etc…but what took the longest was to re-train my vegetation for the new, and correct watering methods. I adjusted all my root depths over the course of a year, and now are at the default levels.