RainMachine Watering in Houston
Hi there,
My rain machine started watering my yard at 75% today. We received over 40" last week and I am pretty sure my Yard does not need water right now. I am subscribed to NOAA and a local Wunderground station and my settings are on for forecast adjustments.
Is there something I am missing? I only set this up prior to Harvey and it did seem to be cutting back prior to the arrival of the storm, but I was not expecting it to resume watering.
I'm wondering if it doesn't look back far enough in history especially considering they significant amount of rain we received ? Typically after a week without rain, watering again would make sense.
Thanks for any suggestions!
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Hi,
Even with a lot of water the soil field capacity is limited, whatever is more that what soil can absorb is considered that it has been drained.
If you use the web interface you can go to your zones and see exactly what the field capacity is for each zone. On same window you also have a "show graph" next to field capacity setting that shows how the available water in soil was consumed by the plant evapotranspiration. This graph is shows each program on which that zone exists.
You can increase the field capacity (by percentage) but you must consider that it's also dependent on plant root depth, so even if you increase it a lot the water will be hold at a depth too deep for plant to immediately use it.
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Hi Deana,
First of all we're glad that you are well after that very rough weather. We actually set up a unit and located it in Corpus Christi, and it didn't start to water until Sep 3rd and that's only because some of the Zone setup had a really small Field Capacity due to Lawn having shorter roots. So the top part of the Zone is drying out which can kill plants. However other zones were set up as Trees haven't been watered at all and from the looks of it until the end of next week because roots are deep and evaporation rate for something that deep isn't as high as the one on top. I'm not sure how your Zones are setup. In the mean time I would suggest using the Snooze (Settings > Restrictions > Snooze) you can snooze for Hours, Days or Weeks. After the Snooze, it will just return to its normal function. Also if you have a First Gen HD-12 there is a setting that actually lets the RainMachine water even if it rained after a certain amount of days, by default it is 2 days it was designed as a safety measure. The 2nd Generation does not have this anymore.
Hope this helps
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