Won’t let me select end before sunrise or specific time

post by Desmo on Aug 21, 2018

I deleted an old schedule and now I’m trying to make a new one. I’ve tried flex daily and monthly and several options are grayed out. Never had this issue before.

post by Desmo on Aug 21, 2018

Now that I’m looking into this more. ALL of my existing schedules are giving me the same options. What the heck??

post by DLane on Aug 21, 2018

@Desmo - My Fixed (specific days) and Flex Daily with no restricted days schedules have all options available. The Flex Daily schedule that has restricted days have the options shown above. I think it may do with the restriction days and Rachio building the schedule backwards into a restricted day.

post by Desmo on Aug 22, 2018

I have another Zone called “front slope” that I set up last week with all days selected and I chose “end before sunrise”.

At the time I had all options available. When I go there now. Those are all grayed out.

post by DLane on Aug 22, 2018

@Desmo - may have been a change / “feature” introduced with the latest released version 3.8.

post by Desmo on Aug 22, 2018

Well if this is a new “feature” then someone needs to rethink this. I don’t want my lawn to start watering at 8pm which is technically “after sunset”. And I don’t want to have to figure out how to start each zone so they don’t overlap. What the hell is going on??

post by franz on Aug 22, 2018

Yes, we only support one “end by” schedule now (per controller). There were too many variables that weren’t allowing them to always function as intended (they get extremely difficult when spanning days and/or are stacked against each other, skips with weather intelligence). The product team is working on explaining that better in the app. Sorry for the confusion.

post by Desmo on Aug 22, 2018

I had a perfectly functioning schedule for all my zones and now what do I do? I have to manually tell each zone when to start? How do I prevent overlapping runs? Using the “start after sunset” is NOT a good option. I’m beyond frustrated with this change.

post by DLane on Aug 22, 2018

@Desmo - Rachio will only run one schedule at a time. If multiple schedules have the same fixed start time, one will be started and then after it completely finishes the next schedule will start. I’d stagger the schedules by 10 - 15 minutes each just to give Rachio time to pause/delay the correct schedule if Flex or intelligence is turned on and multiple schedules will fire.

post by Linn on Aug 22, 2018

How many schedules do you currently have? You can put everything into one schedule if you want, and have the system manage it. I’ve chosen to have three schedules. One is for some flowers that I have water at 8am in the morning. Another is for my drips, which I let start at 9:30am in the morning since they can water during the day with no problem. Then for my grass, I put all the zones into one schedule. Once I did that, I looked at the duration for that schedule and said to myself that I wanted it to finish up by 7am or so — I took the total duration time, backed that up in my head, and set my lawn zones schedule to begin watering at 4:30am in the morning – only if they all water on the same day will they hit that 7am time. A little bit manual to figure out, but not difficult, and it works.

post by Desmo on Aug 22, 2018

I think it was 5 schedules for 7 zones. I put the 3 lawns on one, two drip lines on one, a xeriscape on one and another mix vegetation zone on manual. I set the first 3 schedules all to flex daily and “end before sunrise” (which was the recommended setting) and I let the computer figure it out, and it worked great. I’m mostly frustrated that Rachio didn’t communicate this change was coming to customers via an email. Instead just one day when I decided to switch up some zones and update the schedules I discover that the options are gone. No explanation. Nothing.

post by mckynzee on Aug 22, 2018

Hey @Desmo, I understand your frustration with the lack of communication, and I apologize for that. Like Franz mentioned, this restriction was introduced to prevent irregular stacking behavior that could sometimes result in schedules not running at all. More information can be found here under number five, and the complete release notes for the 3.8 release (which is when this change was implemented) can be found here. We are planning on implementing better explanation of the grayed out options in the next release, but I agree the transition would have been easier if the two features were released together. This is something we will learn from and apply to future release planning.

post by davelr on Aug 23, 2018

@franz, So a question on this topic which I just noticed. I have five separate schedules, 4 flex monthly, 1 fixed. I have all of these set to “end by” 7 AM. All the schedules still show that way and I haven’t noticed any particular problems with them running. 1) I assume that this means that they are all still running correctly that way, true? 2) I also assume that if I have to recreate them I CANNOT recreate them that way, true?

post by franz on Aug 23, 2018

Correct. We have experienced an issue with stacking where a schedule would be set to not run due to weather intelligence, weather changes and there is no more room for the schedule so it got skipped. Limited edge case that only allowing one “end by” schedule will resolve. Most customers won’t experience this.

post by Cj-Cj-Cj on Aug 24, 2018

Hi @franz - if this is a limited edge case, then why not leave it as it was and handle it with a log entry / push notification. The user wakes up to this and has the option of kicking off a manual run that morning before it gets too hot. Your current method pretty much takes the automation out of the product. As another user mentioned, we don’t want schedules kicking off at sunset… not for grass anyway.

post by davelr on Aug 24, 2018

@franz, thanks for the clarification. I’d like to do a +1 on CJ’s suggestion though.

post by toddbecker on Aug 27, 2018

@franz while I understand the issue identified, it doesn’t seem like there was full consideration of the possible use cases. The current implementation is overly restrictive and does not account for scenarios that could not introduce the conflicts cited as the drivers for this change. Please consider revisiting the conditions for disabling these scheduling options; there are viable use cases that do not conflict with the original drivers of this change.

post by franz on Aug 27, 2018

@mitchell @mckynzee Feels like there might be some room to modify “end-by” constraints in certain situations. I’ll let the product team review and determine what the next steps are.