I have a fairly large house and 3 smart sprinkler timers. When they all work, they work great, but I’ve been changing batteries frequently and one or another seems to be having connectivity issues. I’ve done some reading & I believe adding an additional hub to our home will resolve the battery drain/connectivity issue (Current arrangement is Hub 1 Front, Side, & Back yards new arrangement would be Hub 1 Front yard Hub 2 Side & Back yards all running at the same time 2x/day sunrise and 7pm). I’ve tried finding where to go to add a new hub to an existing account/home and I can’t. Other than forgetting everything & starting from scratch, setting-up with the new arrangement, is there a way to just add a new hub & transfer the side and back yard timers to the new hub? I also bought lithium AA batteries b/c I’m also wondering if our generic brand batteries aren’t that great. Hopefully one of these two solutions will fix the problem.
A new hub will not help with that issue. The only thing a new hub could potentially hub with is if you were having range connectivity issues (the first hub is too far away from one or more of the valves)
Lithium batteries are definitely recommended for the valves. I believe we have predicted about 2 years life with them (I would take them out when not in use in the Winter)
Can you explain this issue more? The new batteries might help with this situation.
Good afternoon,
Thanks for the quick response.
I switched out the old generic batteries to the Lithium ones, they seem to be working like a charm. We will see how long they last.
Regarding the connectivity issues, we live in a fairly large home (over 3,000 sq ft 100 yr old hone - think plaster walls and brick/limestone exterior). The side & back yard valves are significantly further from the hub than the front yard valve. Everything is connected to Wifi through a mesh network of extenders. When it works, everything works great. But I was having issues where the front & back valve would be fine, but the side would be “busy” or “disconnected” or the side and front would be fine, but then the back would be "disconnected or “busy”. I’d swap the generic batteries and everything would work better for a week or two. I thought that the valves distance from (searching for) the hub might be causing the batteries to drain quicker than they should which would lead to issues that appeared to be connectivity ones.
But from what you told me earlier, the batteries themselves may have been less than ideal for this application. As indicated, I started off by switching out the batteries. Fingers crossed that better batteries do the trick. I’ll re-post if connection/quick battery drain rears it’s head again.
