My schedule does not trigger watering
I have a 12-zone RainMachine (purchased in June 2016). It was working fine until about 5-6 weeks ago, when the schedule would no longer water the zones as programmed. It would trigger but each zone would "run" for a split second, and go on to the next one, and the next one, and stop, and the next scheduled watering would then show for the next day, as if it was done normally.
Rebooting the device helped, but only for a few days, when the problem started happening again. Deleting the program would also work, but also only for a few days. Thankfully it has been raining quite often lately so watering wasn't needed, but still, the watering schedule would not happen.
So I reset the RainMachine to factory defaults and reprogrammed the entire device. Guess what, same problem. I even set the minimum watering for each zone to be 15 seconds, so I would easily notice if the schedule was actually doing something. But it's still not happening.
For now I have a reminder on my calendar to start the program by hand, which works fine, but it defeats the purpose of a RainMachine.
I am at the latest firmware level. What else can I do to make my RainMachine work as it's supposed to?
Thanks.
Pierre
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Hi Nicholas,
Thanks for replying.
I do not have a water sensor in the soil so I do not know how RainMachine would know. Besides there has been many hot days w/o rain when RainMachine should have triggered watering but did not.
The watering logs show no watering except when I triggered the program manually. So yes the duration shown are correct.
Anyway ...... about 7-10 days ago, it all of a sudden started working again (and I had not changed a single setting since resetting my RainMachine 3+ weeks ago) and has worked every day since, even not watering for the past 3 days as it rained a lot or was very cool, or watering less when it hadn't been so hot. The only explanation I have is that the data coming from the whether service was bogus and fooling RainMachine into not watering, and it finally got fixed 7-10 days ago. The diagnostics showed that the weather service was being reached ok. So it must have been the data. That's the only way I can explain it (and yes my address in RainMachine is correct).
I have not removed my daily calendar reminder 1 minute before RainMachine is supposed to trigger, so I can continue to pay attention.But frankly, this is really weird.
Can RainMachine get data from more than 1 weather service and "average" the two or something similarly smart?
Thanks.
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RainMachine handles soil moisture virtually: precipitation is IN evapotranspiration is OUT. If IN < OUT then you need to irrigate, otherwise just skip watering and substract from soil moisture the OUT.
Multiple weather sources is one of the top features of RainMachine you can do that and it's usually recommended especially if you have a microclimate that doesn't quite fit the forecast from 1 weather source.
When RainMachine doesn't start watering it's probably because it thinks there is enough moisture/available water in soil. This can be checked by going to Web UI > Zone > click on Show Graph (next to Field Capacity) setting.
If you have water in soil and you think it's wrong you can also decrease Field Capacity value to restrict how much water it will hold.
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I have added 2 more weather sources (some of the others were giving errors when refreshing, while two I added do not).
I understand the concept of IN and OUT but do not see where you set anything related to this. Unless it's the rain sensitivity, which is currently set at 80% (I think it's the default). Is it?
Thanks
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