My Rachio 3 recently died from a boot error. My unit is 2.5 years old so support told me it is out of warranty and I must buy another one. When I researched here on the community I was shocked to find so many other occurrences of the same problem.
Countless owners with the same problem and no solution but to replace it. It would seem to me at this level of failure there should be a hardware recall. The current expectation seems to be that we will just buy a new unit every couple of years, but how can I justify purchasing another unit with known hardware problems with the probability it will occur again? This really makes it so the Rachio devices cannot be trusted to last and be reliable.
I’m left with little choice but to consider my options elsewhere. Is there any other help Rachio can provide on this issue?
I’m not here to make an excuse, but to say there are countless issues might be a bit much. For the most part, people come to the community when they are having issues, so it only makes sense that when you search for something, you can find more that one instance of whatever problem you might have. Based on the number of Rachio units out in circulation, I’d bet this boot error is an issue affecting a miniscule population of owners.
That doesn’t make your issue any less annoying, and it would be interesting to know if it is a hardware issue due to power surges damaging or corrupting memory (seems many issues come after a power outage), or a software/firmware bug. Not sure if @dane or @franz can ping some of the engineers to see if they have ever replicated this issue.
I appreciate your fair response, and can agree “countless” might be a stretch. I probably could count the instances reported on the community. One post had 67 comments, many of which were “me too.” These also don’t account for people who have had the problem and had it resolved by support in warranty and didn’t feel the need to post. I can’t quantify the total or overall percentage. While likely a small minority of units (I don’t know how many Rachio has sold), it does seem a common enough problem to me to raise the question about bad hardware failing on its own.
Any chance you got a positive resolution out of this? My controller dropped off my wifi out of the blue, wouldn’t connect, and when I unplugged it and moved it closer to the AP to try and figure out what was wrong I ended up getting a boot error and the controller is toast. The only thing I can do now is buy another Rachio or buy a competitor’s product
