Again, like I mentioned in the other thread, start your own thread and include your current settings, and lets take a look.
I simply could not use the āflexā scheduling here in Palm Springs. The smarts of the Rachio just donāt take into account this environment well. I now have it running three fixed schedules that water each zone twice daily. One of them does a very thorough watering every odd morning. One does a short watering every even morning. One does a short watering every evening. This is working well, my plants are happy. Anything less than this would result in many dead plants. Previously, when I tried using Flex scheduling with all the tips that people were giving me here, I nearly lost some big specimen palms and other plants. This environment is just not forgiving of even minor mistakes. The Rachio does make it easy to make sure the water is being used more efficiently. I like being able to set a soak time (I use 30 minutes) in between short watering sessions (typically 3 to 5 minutes). This makes sure the water goes to the plants, not wasted. It also does a seasonal shift and adds/subtracts a minute or two of watering when needed. And of course, on the rare occasion that it actually does rain, it wonāt bother watering that session.
Iād beg to differā¦The only thing Palm Springs has that Arizona doesnāt, is constant wind, but Rachio accounts for that in Crop Evapotranspiration.
IIRC, you had adjustable bubblers in your system. Iād still argue that while it might take some time, you could easily move away from watering daily (and twice daily! 
) and move towards a more efficient (and arguably correct way) to water. Iām glad that your fixed schedules twice a day are working well for you, but ultimately, you are only promoting shallow roots structures. Deep roots allow for longer intervals between waterings. Heck, growing up, we only ever had flood irrigation for our trees, so they only got water every 13-14 days, even in the heat of the summer!
I changed the variable bubblers to fixed (1gpm for large trees, 0.5gpm for smaller shrubs, with 1/4" tubing with 0.5gpm drippers for large pots). Trying to ātrainā my plants resulted in nearly killing them. Iām not risking $10K+ palm trees for experiments with an irrigation controller. The palms were especially distressed (frond tips turning brown as much as 8" to 10"), as well as the roses (lost one of them, an older rose that I canāt replace because it is no longer available), plus lost several smaller plants. No more killing since changing to fixed scheduling.
Fair enoughā¦
I was in your boat, even prior to Rachio. Previous owner of my house had trees watering every other day for an hour, and I started adjusting towards a ācorrectā watering schedule with my old Hunter controller until I switched to Rahio. Probably took me an honest two years of slowly adjusting between both controllers (using root depth setting on Rachio) until I got it where it needed to be. Now my trees water ever 7-9 days even in the 110+ temps we are having right now.
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I, too, live in Palm Springs. The previous owners had the typical water every day setup, with grass watering several times daily, all summer long.
We upgraded the entire house to a smart home and went with the Rachio 3. I did make sure the square footage and soil for each zone was correct and basically āhopedā Rachio was correct about the rest of the Flex Daily calculations. After 8 months now, I only had to add time to one zone. I have done two grass re-seeds (one Bermuda, now Winter Rye) using the Fixed schedule.
Iām happy to report all is well. Stopped a Phytophthora plague on the Ficus and Carolina Cherry hedges, saving the $300 monthly fungicide and fertilizing expense (114 of the Cherries were unsalvageable, but the other 300+ trees recovered.)
The current reseed schedule is 6X daily for 3 minutes on high efficiency rotators (8 am, 10 am, 12 pm, 2 pm, 4 pm and 6 pm). Only 18 minutes daily is far less than the usual for Palm Springsian reseeds.
Rachio was also able to stop the annual slaughter of succulents when the heat let off. We only lost two Agaves when they boiled at 122Ā°.
Rachio has been a champ!
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