r/rachio

I was watering my garden with a Rachio smart hose valve and the built-in scheduler last year, but I felt like I never knew if I was over or underwatering. This year I wanted to add Ecowitt moisture sensors, and I immediately thought I should be able to trigger waterings based on the moisture — but I couldn't find any way to connect them, and as far as I could tell, no wireless moisture-based watering product exists at all.

So I built an app (really a web-based tool with mobile optimization for now) that could bridge them. As I started developing it, I figured I could make it into something that anyone could use. It reads the Ecowitt soil moisture, runs the Rachio in short pulses when a bed is dry, checks the soil between cycles, and stops when it's right. You add crops and every crop has a moisture profile which feeds the watering triggers. I've built in a time-based schedule backup in case a sensor goes offline.

It's called Garzed. If anyone who has Rachio or Ecowitt hardware is interested in trying it out in these early months with me, I'm looking for a few people to give me feedback.

https://garzed.com

Happy to answer questions.

— Brad

I don't want to spend the money for a PWS, but I think a quality rain sensor is in order. I have one of the old school models that rely on rainfall swelling felt disks inside the unit which, conceptually, swell enough to close the circuit and signal the controller not to run. It rarely works.

Any suggestions on a rain gauge that you use and like?

We have a Rachio at our home, and I'm setting one up at a rental. The tenants at the rental do not want to share their Wi-Fi password; they're concerned about security. They haven't offered to administer the account, but that doesn't work for us because we want access to it, and we don't want them administering the Rachio at our house. Is there a workaround that will work for both of us?

This may or may not apply to heatwave boost, but that seems to be the only one that's temperature dependent.

I have one zone in our lawn that is where there's a large shale formation under ground. This area also gets a lot of direct sun. As you can imagine the shale gets hot and the grass kind of bakes from above and below.

My irrigation guy suggested that I set up a periodic schedule for the hot part of the day to run for a bit to cool off the grass.

Ideally, I'd like to hit that zone in mid-day only when the temp is above 85° or not at all. The Heat Wave Boost only seems to work against an already existing schedule, adding "X%" based on temp. I tried that last year and it really wasn't all that effective. I ended up running a manual schedule for those hot days.

I currently run flex daily with fully configured advanced zone info and it runs perfectly.

I'm wondering if anybody has figured out a way to kind of 'game the system" to see if you can achieve something like I'm looking for.

We have a fixed schedule as we can only water on specific days (Sunday and Thursday) so are the soil moisture level 's meaningful to us? Watered yesterday but 7 zones range form 0%-68%. Assume this number changes daily and we are forecast for some heavy rains next few days. If no rain was forecast, are we supposed to increase run time on the next scheduled day in the zones that are 0 or low %'s? Thanks.

Can anyone tell me why its still watering when its raining out?

I have adjusted the weather station to one closer months back, today it shows 100% chance of rain today with .75" expected.

I have the weather skip threshold set to 1/4"

But its still watering while its pouring out.

I just bought a rain sensor but what good is the weather part if it does not take it into account.

Also, i cant find the rain skip button anymore, I'm assuming it was removed? I have to log in and stop the watering manually.

Any suggestion on settings to prevent it from watering while its raining out? Thanks!