I have been using Rain Bird’s esp-smte for a while and was very satisfied with its features. But since it doesn’t have the Wi-Fi interface thought of trying Rachio 2nd gen.
So far I like every feature of Rachio but still desire some missing feature of esp-smte like options in Manual watering mode. For example I cannot choose all the zones I want to water for a specific time and say “GO”. This feature is very helpful when you want to water certain zones for a brief period of time.
I have multiple zones in which I have different vegetation with different sprinkler heads. For example apart from Lawn turf I have flower beds with shrubs that have risers and Vegetable beds with drip. Recently when I applied lawn fertilizer and I wanted to water just lawn(8 zones) but not the other ones. I had to manually select one zone run it for a specific time; select the other one, run it and keep doing it manually for all the other ones. It was very frustrating and time consuming. Instead I wish to have the below fetures.
Other features I’d like to have is the ability to skip a watering session from the schedule. For example as per schedule On Tuesday Front Easement (zone 1) will get watered for 14 minutes in 2 cycles. But someone parked their new car in front of it and I want to skip watering it on Tuesday so that it can be picked up next day.Now sure if I can do it now.
Regarding manual watering options, you can select which zones you want to water and set specific times for each. From the manual watering interface, you’ll select one zone, set the desired run time, then you select the zone drop down list again and select the other zone you want to water, set the desired time, and continue like this until you have selected all zones you want to water. After that you can just hit run and it will water the specified zones.
@scorp508@bob1174 I agree our current interface can be unintuitive/ a bit tedious. Thank you for the feedback (and those mock ups!!), the remote is something we are looking to improve in upcoming software releases!
