Start Time Determined Backwards From Sunrise

[helosix]

Loving my new Rachio 3! Most Advanced settings now set to what I think is correct, at least for now.
Looking at the Daily Flex schedules, I have it set to finish before sunrise. I want to save as much water as possible, so that is great. However, I see the start times for each scheduled day is shortly after midnight even is a single zone it to run for only 20 minutes.
Why not have an option for the start time(s) to be calculated back from sunrise. Meaning, water as close to sunrise as possible, starting later rather than sooner?

We have serious issues with fungal diseases threatening St. Aug. turf here in Central TX. Most gardeners and landscapers recommend not watering at night so as to increase risk for fungal issues during the cooler nights. Watering just after midnight can leave the roots soaked for 6-7 hours.
I guess I can track the typical longest single days run time (~5.5 hrs atm) and set it to “Start After” late enough to finish before sunrise. However, that won’t help days with a single short run.

I’m sure you guys worked with the lawn pros when in algorithm development, but It would still be night have the option, to make each run start as late as possible AND still finish before sunrise.
Thanks!

[franz]

@helosix We have a known issue with stacking zones in a flex daily schedule and ending by sunrise. Zones are variable in the schedule so for simplicity we have to stack them out and aren’t as efficient as we would like. It’s in our software backlog, just don’t know when we will get to it

Here is some more information on the topic:

Finished before sunrise scheduling issue?

Todd, how did you ‘split your single Flex Daily schedule into 2 schedules’? I need to do the same (for the same reason you stated), but not sure how to do this. Thanks!

Watering Start Time: Automatic Sunrise Adjustment

Hi Rachio team! First off, love your product! - Since it’s important to let watering start before sunrise and sunrise time constantly changes throughout the year, it would be great to have an automatic adjustment to the watering start time, where we can select a certain time before sunrise to begin the watering. The app could re-calculate and adjust to start the watering automatically at the desired time before sunrise. This way we won’t have to adjust to the changing sunrise times manually thr…

[helosix]

@franz Many thanks! I’m sure the team has quite a few items on whiteboard to get checked off.
Going to start reading them now. First thought; time buffers (gaps), like soak time. Or simply “time shifting” the the schedule to fill gaps. I should probably go read what SME says first.
(I’m a telecom eng. and frequently deal with time sequences, order of precedence, variables, etc…)
Cheers!

[franz]

Our lead scheduling engineer @theflexdude has some great ideas how to make this more ideal but it is a very complex problem (and will take some time to enhance) when you start layering in restricted days, dynamically built schedules (aka flex daily where zones run independently) and scheduling features like end before sunrise.