Not Watering--Incorrectly Reporting Water Surplus
My Rainmachine was working fine until June 16. Since then it rarely runs the scheduled programs. I just found about this a couple of days ago when my wife told me that the grass was getting drier, she didn't think the sprinklers were going on as I set them, and she has been watering manually later in the day.
Checking the history, I found that it only went through the cycle once since June 16, and gives water surplus as the reason. However the grass is not getting enough water. How do I get it to continue to adjust by weather (such as not going on if raining) but continue to run despite its mistaken calculation of a water surplus. As this problem just started recently, could there have been a faulty program update?
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It looks like you had .92 inches of rain, on the 16th that started this. Afterwards you continued to have rain and cloud cover.
There a couple of different remedies we could try here.
On zones that are drying out, lets make sure the Soil and Vegetation types are set correctly.
The unit will water vastly different for clay then it will for sand.
If soil/vegetation is set correctly we may need to increase the Field Capacity for each zone that is drying out.I see zone 1 has a higher field capacity and it ran today.
If you think the forecast is wrong we can turn down the Rain Sensitivity.By default this is set to 80, and could be moved to around 40%.This way the rain will be taken into account less, in the formula.I hope this helps, let me know if you continue to have trouble.
Brandon
RainMachine Support
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Since I left the message I read more here and tried changing soil type from clay to sand thinking it would not think the soil was retaining as much water. However maybe I'm looking at this backwards. This changed the Field Capacity to lower numbers. Are you saying I need higher numbers?
We haven't had very much rain and it seems to have failed to run on days when it did not indicate rain. I don't think the problem is that it falsely thinks it is raining. However now that I'm aware of the problem I will be watching it more closely to see if that is the case.
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You are correct, you need to lower the field capacity to reduce the number of days of irrigation skip because of water in soil. After all the calculations, corrections and predictions it's very simple: We compute a day EvapoTranspiration, depending on plant (grass is ~0.8 of day ET) we need to replenish this by irrigation or from rain. So more or less RAIN is IN ET is OUT. A rain event of 2 inches will be enough for 2 days with ET of 1 inch.
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The computations your system comes up with are seriously flawed. A very brief period of light rain results in it overriding scheduled watering not only that day, bu ton subsequent days.
It appears that manually watering is also taken into consideration, leading to it failing to water on subsequent days falsely thinking there is a water surplus.
If we are manually watering, it means that the grass has not been getting enough water, and it only exacerbates the problem by failing to water the next time it is scheduled to. I think we keep getting into cycles where it doesn't water enough, we respond by manually watering more, and it then continues to fail to water as scheduled, making us have to frequently water manually.
At least we now know what is going on, and do water it manually now that we realize this is happening. However, some of the areas which got too dry before we realized it was not watering have never recovered. Saving water is great in theory, but not when it kills the lawn and we have to reseed. -
Manual operation is never taken into account for available water or anything else.
Please check out this guide on how to remedy some of these situations: https://support.rainmachine.com/hc/en-us/articles/228001428-Troubleshooting-Why-a-zone-won-t-turn-on-
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