Set it and forget it?

So I bought the rachio in July after getting tired of wasting water. I have a rain sensor but I live in Seattle and the rain sensor only helps you when it has already rained. So what happened is I would water and then it would rain. Anyway…

I bought the rachio, although I know nothing about landscaping (this is a yard in the new house we built). But I am techie. So I replaced the old Hunter with new Rachio, set it up to the best of my ability, and set it to ‘flex schedule’. The weather station shows 11 miles away from my house (nothing closer). This might sound like an infomercial but I just ‘set it and forget it’. It waters when it needs, it know when it has rained and when it will rain. The schedule at which it engages seems to make sense (week without rain? it is on it!). The grass is always green. I don’t know if I am saving money on water yet (not enough data).

I am writing this because I see people having issues with flex schedules and reverting to fixed etc. Am I missing something? As I said, I know next to nothing about landscaping. Did I get lucky? This thing is almost too good to be true? I usually don’t write these type of ‘reviews’ :smile:

Thoughts?

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Just to pile on here, I am having the same experience. It just works.

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Ditto to your story… I have had terrible experiences with watering my lawn over the years. I too have no landscaping knowledge but I am very much interested in technology and Internet of Things. I can tell you from my experience that this past watering season I didn’t save much in terms of water gallons used however my lawn looked fantastic this year instead of always having the burnt lawn in our neighborhood. Just like you said… set it and forget it. One thing that made a huge difference for me with the Rachio was to switch from using a local Personal Weather Station to the closest Weather Station (7 mi away), accuracy was so much better! Best of luck! I’m looking forward to new integration updates and improvements from Rachio for my next watering season.

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Thanks for posting these comments @tachtevrenidis, @altdachs, @johnesc. I read each and every one of the posts on the forum, good/bad/indifferent. I believe the core of our mission is connecting people to their yard or outside, watering efficiently, and hopefully bringing some enjoyment to a task that before now has only been possible of being performed by a small, elite circle.

I would like to use this thread to let you know we are working on a Spring release that we hope will ultimately create the perfect blend of schedules (fixed/flex), flixed? :smiley: . Having written software for a long time, IMHO it usually take about 3 iterations to get something exactly how you had envisioned. Some people can do it in two tries, I am however not that person.

That’s all I can say for now, but I wanted to share that we continually are listening and strive to build the best irrigation scheduling software and controller in the industry. There are so many things we can still incorporate and do plan on incorporating in the future :wink:

Go Broncos! :football:

:cheers:

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Glad to hear your lawns are looking great! :smiley:

@tachtevrenidis & @johnesc, out of curiosity, were there any steps of the zone setup process that confused you? Or required you to do some research and reconfigure at a later time?

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The only part I really had to research was the soil type as I had no prior knowledge as to what the correct setting would be. I did make a few changes to the soil type after my research and then actually speaking to a landscaper when he was meeting with my neighbor. I struggled while using the Personal Weather Stations but after your recommendation, I disabled that and selected the closest Weather Station and the flex schedule definitely improved its watering frequencies based on all the different variables.

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I haven’t hit summer yet, but all my testing on the side indicates it is set and forget for the coming up summer, once past the initial tuning.

I will say one thing though, it is suggesting watering in the off season when the grass is dormant. I haven’t found a way to disable that. My lawn service says in the winter only needs 1" water a month. Its currently suggesting more. I’m not sure if it is a tuning issue or I should just be smart and turn it off for the winter.

I do love the flex schedules.

If you’d like to put the device in sleep mode, this should help :wink:

:cheers:

Yes, I have found the sleep button. But my question to myself is - is it really set it and forget it, if I have to apply sleep during the non-growing season.

Flex schedules view each zone as a bucket with an amount to fill up (soil moisture level).

During the winter there still is evapotranspiration (taking water out of the bucket) happening, even if it is almost non-existent.

Funny story. Had a customer concerned that his flex schedule was disabled and it ran the other day. Turns out, the schedule was enabled but hadn’t run for about 30 days because his daily ET values were about .03in/day plus precipitation events. Assuming you have a bucket that takes about .7in to fill up, you can see where the confusion would be. :wink:

Our software does not currently shut off for your winter months, but something we would like to incorporate someday.

I believe most people have a normal shutdown process where the blow out their sprinklers and put the Iro in sleep mode.

Hope this helps. We are working on even simpler, more intelligent, more feature rich schedules. Not committing to any dates, but stay tuned.

:cheers:

I agree. I think what I am seeing is a response to complete lack of soil depth. Stupid home builder. Yup, sod on rock works great.

ET is only 0.03, but still showing watering every so often (about 7-8 days).

Probably reasonable this time of year for anything except bermuda which goes pretty dormant.

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Took maybe an hour to changeover from twin controllers to the Rachio. A little fumbling figuring out how to set up two different schedules, and a little sanding of the slightly oversize wires from the zones to fit in the very snug contacts. Seems to do everything I expected and more. Great online community and support. Only regret that I received the unit yesterday and today read that a Ver. 2 has been released. I think HomeKit is overblown and getting a slow start, so I can probably live without it. Almost everything on our property is now cleanly networked, and the savings in energy use (and water, I’m sure, after it’s been running for a while) make it all worthwhile. A great product.

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Thanks for the feedback, please let us know if you have any other questions or feedback.

This Spring we are doing a major overhaul of schedules, combining the best of both fixed and flex while adding more features and making them much simpler to understand. Very excited for this upcoming release.

Have a great day!

:cheers:

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Aaahhh, spring time…cold beer, warm afternoons, sundresses and a new iro scheduler, noice!

My deck at the moment.

:cheers: