Hi,
I am Lukas from the Netherlands,
I am asked by my parents to build a (smart) sprinkler system in the garden.
In Europe, the only application available to make your sprinkler system smart is from Gardena and very expensive. So I started googling and found Rachio.
I am planning to buy a gen 2, besides the power problem (which can easily be fixed by an adapter) are there any other problems that come by installing Rachio in Europe?
Can the units in the app be changed to metric (L, kg, etc.)?
Hi Lukas, i am using the rachio gen 1 since a few years in the Netherlands
Everything works fine. There are a few things to look out for:
in europe, wifi can have one more channel to use than in the USA. If your home wifi uses the extra channel (because you tweaked it that way) , the rachio will not be able to connect (as i found out the hard way). If you direct your wifi hotspot to not use the extra channel ( i think it was something like channel 14) no problem
220 to 24 volt AC seems easy to come by, but proved difficult for me. You can use old christmas lightning transformers, they deliver 24 Volt AC quite well.
you can easily connect to a public weatherstation nearby.
when you have set everything up, test the mm’s you get in an hour for each sprinkler by putting straight cups in a straight line and measuring the mm’s after an hour; although i use only rainbird 3504’s the suggested mm’s in the rachio app are way to high
Succes with everything!
