The company I purchased the Rachio 3 from sent me a replacement. It took me less than 15 minutes after plugging it in to get it set up. So it was a bad unit. I wish there would have been something somewhere that described if you have a blinking 1st quadrant that has an intermittent red, then there is something wrong with the units wifi reception. I spent well over 6 hours trying to troubleshoot the unit and felt there should have been a quicker way to find the problem. I have the tools to check the signal even though the router was less than 20ft away and was still told by tech support to run through all the troubleshoot tips I found here and elsewhere on the web and had already performed.
Now that it is up and running I can see why people like this device. I wish they would spend a little more time on quality checks and customer support. Email support only with a 24-48 hour promise of response is a bit antequated for such a high tech device/company although I did get a response with in a few hours. All that said, so far I like the ease of use and the capabilities of the Rachio 3 but I have only had it up and running a couple of hours.
Stewart, here is the response I sent to you via email last week but see it did not show up here.
"I have used youtube, the Rachio website and read through many of the community posts to no avail. This is my first post.
The unit, when plugged in only shows a flashing blue/white light in the first quadrant with an intermittent red one. The wifi signal from the unit will only broadcast for a few seconds before it disappears only to come back about 20 seconds later. My router is only about 20 feet away from the unit. No firewall. I have used my Samsung 9, Samsung 7 and windows 10 laptop to try to connect to the unit, again to no avail except the intermittent connection before the unit drops signal. I canāt get past trying to connect in setup with the app so the app is useless at this point."
Weāllā¦Iām gonna have to jump in here. I would think after this much time this issue would have been fixed. I just got my unit hooked up and Iām getting the same issue unable to connect to the Wi-Fi. I have an Android phone and Google Wi-Fi. Iāve tried repeatedly and just canāt get it to work. Does anyone have a simple solution to get this working? I canāt believe it takes this long to figure out a Wi-Fi connection issue. Itās 2021 after allā¦
First, confirm that you can get the controller into āawaiting Wi-Fiā state (2nd quadrant blinking).
Then, turn off mobile data on the phone. Open your Wi-Fi settings and you should see a Rachio-xxxxxx network, where xxxxxx is the last 6 characters of the MAC address. Connect to that network (of course you wonāt have internet access) and let the phone sit for two minutes. If a message pops up warning you of no connectivity, choose the option to remain connected. Now, reconnect to your Google Wi-Fi, run the app and try to connect the controller.
If you fail (still quadrant 2 blinking), try to use a different device (Windows, Mac or Linux) to provision the controller. See
OTOH, if you fail but you get a different error (report details), then your Wi-Fi or network configuration may be blocking the controller from connecting to the cloud. To confirm this, temporarily set up a phone as a mobile hotspot (confirm with a second phone that itās working properly) and try to connect the controller to that. If it succeeds, we can then see whatās different about the Google connection.
If you donāt have two phones for the hotspot test, use your working phone as the hotspot and use an old phone or tablet (no SIM card needed) to run the Rachio app. If you donāt have an old phone, use your phone as the hotspot and a desktop or laptop (as described above) to provision the controller.
ISP? Modem make/model? If modem is a gateway (has more than one Ethernet port), do you have it in bridge mode? How many Google Wi-Fi devices do you have? How are they connected to your modem? Are they in bridge mode?
