My Rachio - and some fun

I’ve been one of the early adopters (Pre-order on the 30th April 2014)) of the Rachio. As a tech geek I just love it and the company has evolved the UI so much by listening to us - a rare breed of company these days. I travel a lot (and am writing this from the UK where I spend a lot of time). I thought I’d share some “stuff”;

  1. We were with friends once (on fixed boat on the side of the River Thames) having a few drinks. My wife managed to get her sister who was staying at our house in Atlanta, outside on the lawn and chat / video via Skype, on the pretense she wanted to show our friends her flowers. Sucker… We soaked her sister something rotten as we watched as she stood smack in the middle of my Zone 3 large sprinkler heads. We were a bit drunk but it was hilarious :wink:

  2. I don’t use the RACHIO to save money because I have a river pump and pretty much pay nothing for water. However, for me, the simplicity and control I now have, as a traveler s a game changer. I have 10 zones currently and plan to add more “tricks” for my flower baskets and flower barrels next spring/summer.

  3. As I installed a relay switch to turn my river pump on when the IRO comes on, I installed a tap/hose in the main line and added a “FAKE” Zone 11. Now, I turn on the tap/hose then on the RACHIO phone app, when I turn on Zone 11, the pump kicks in and I have a hose where I wanted one without having to run extra plumbing :smile:

  4. My ideas for gadgets to connect to this in future are; Moisture sensors, leak detectors, flow detectors, dye injectors (so you can water with a non—toxix dye and see where your zones hit/miss after a 1 min run on each zone. The dye will disappear from the next watering. Valves that report faults/flow/stats (low power, solar perhaps). I also want to look into remote zones (WIFI connected) that don’t to be connected by wire to the RACHIO directly but can be on any WIFI. Again, solar. Anyway, lots of cool ideas from all of us in this community I see posted.

  5. Recently had some new turf installed to replace where my gardeners had slowly shrunk the lawn with their hap-hazard laying of pine straw. In just in 5 minutes created a new schedule to water twice a day just those areas.

So, watering gardens never used to be a topic of conversation over dinner, but now it is and I love tech when it works - and this just works.

WEL DONE TEAM and all the customers whom have contributed…

3 Likes

I love device.

Kudos to the support team who are like tennis players when it comes to support, suggestions and recommendations. They are in it to win. Thank you all :wink:

4.My ideas for gadgets to connect to this in future are; Moisture sensors, leak detectors, flow detectors, dye injectors (so you can water with a non—toxix dye and see where your zones hit/miss after a 1 min run on each zone. The dye will disappear from the next watering. Valves that report faults/flow/stats (low power, solar perhaps). I also want to look into remote zones (WIFI connected) that don’t to be connected by wire to the RACHIO directly but can be on any WIFI. Again, solar. Anyway, lots of cool ideas from all of us in this community I see posted.”

Take a look at 3 charts, Water Usage - 15 hr History, Daily Water Usage - 13 mo History, and Monthly Water Usage - 13 mo History, all part of the charts at http://www.welserver.com/WEL0343/ .

This is an example of integrating my Rachio system to my energy monitoring system via using the Iro’s Pump On/Off control terminal.

Nice write up. Enjoyed reading. Believe you’ll need to search for Wi-Fi enabled moisture sensors coupled with Rachio support for a cloud-to-cloud data transfer in order to implement closed loop water control. The Iro hardware wise is not well set up to accommodate hard wired moisture sensors.

Best regards,

Bill

These already exist and does not make much sense for rachio to reinvent. The moisture sensor I drop in threads all over. It is the most elegant fix to fringe case failures discussed on the forums.

The flow valve would be nice as well. There are valves out there already but I would prefer the rachio device to interact with it myself so that my usage charts are more accurate and leak notifications aggregated from a single source.

Thank you! :rachio:

Jealous.

Great story, and isn’t it crazy that people are becoming aware of using tech for things where it was not really applied in the past?

:cheers: