I’m really frustrated with the scheduling and the lack of a few simple features.
One main one being the ability to block out/pause during certain times. We have school kids that wait on our corner for the bus and I use the automatic scheduling to maximize the “AI” of the Rachio to know when and how much to water. I’ve moved the watering times back and back and back and kids today got soaked because we had an extra hot day yesterday and the system decided to do a soak. It started at 5am and ran cycles and ended after 8am. The kids get to the corner to wait for the bus at 8am and today they had to stand across the street and we looked like horrible neighbors. I was busy with work and didn’t see it.
So you need the ability to block times and I can give you a list of reasons why. When I manually stop it, it doesn’t pick back up again after X time.
- school kids walking by
- joggers that come by every day at the same time.
- dog walkers that come back every day at the same time
- leaving for work
- letting the dog out at same times every day
- robotics class meetings
- boys scouts meetings
- family breakfast every sundays
- Restricted drought watering times
The list goes on for when I would block out times but would like it to resume it’s course afterwards. But the school kids issues has me frustrated and wanting to go back to fixed schedules, which sort of defeats the purpose of Rachio being intelligent and knowing when/how to water and doing it all on it’s own.
Its lacking a myriad of other features as well, particularly on the notifications side of things. I realize I can use IFTTT but I get notifications from that for plenty of other things can I can’t specify icons to be different when there are different notifications. Using IFTTT will dull the impact of my IMPORTANT notifications versus general day to day notifications.
I could use a zwave plug (I have plenty) and shut the plug off during specified times, but I shouldn’t have to build that kind of work around and do we really want to be powering the system off completely when not needed??