Crowd sourcing zone setup

This is probably for when rachio gains more popularity but here is a thought about simplifying zone setup.

The biggest question for me during zone setup was “what is my soil type?” and “should I edit the root depth?” What about incorporating knowledge from the surrounding neighbors (say 10 miles out) and presenting suggestions based on the most common non-default value for soil type and maybe an average value for the root depth. A message like “52 nearby homes selected ‘Clay Loam’” “52 nearby homes average a 4inch root depth”

And then an automated reminder a month later to check the zones and see if the settings are working well.

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@Raki I really like this idea! If something like that takes a while to set up, maybe some sort of organized table entry of people’s setups on these forums (based on regions & somehow organized by geographies). I know that it would have gotten me going much faster! Heck, for that matter I’d still find it a great reference. @franz, what do you think ?

@Raki @azdavidr We’ve definitely discussed this, and entirely possible through software. Ultimately, after time, this is what our controller will start to do…

Great ideas for sure.

:cheers:

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@franz I can see that a more automated approach would take quite a bit of time, but is there something that we can do in the short term, either on the forums, or on some sort of shared drive ? Those of us active on the forums could manually add their data for new users to have a starting point, not to mention to compare amongst ourselves. I imagine the hardest part would be keeping the data organized by geography.

@azdavidr I’m assuming the biggest confusion is soil type, crop type, and choosing/building the correct nozzle.

Don’t know any easy solutions for the short term, other than forum members asking for help. We know the location of the device so choosing cool/warm season turf and soil type will be relatively easy, but won’t happen this year.

:cheers:

Agreed about the confusion points for first time users. I read ahead on the forums before setting up zones so I knew the importance of choosing the right soil, crop, and nozzle type. The question then became am I making the right choices? Even if consolidating that information into the app isn’t a near term goal, having a category for Zone Setup Examples/Help where users post their zone information and location could have some benefit. I’d think that anyone getting an IRO interested enough having good data about their lawns that the information would be fairly accurate.

As for asking for help, personally there didn’t seem to be a great place for that should it go. General? Support? I also didn’t want to be the first person to have the “I live in Denver what should my settings be” post :wink: If one already exists I totally missed it.

All that said It’s been a week and Iro is already 1000x better than my old controller. Keep up the good work!

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@Raki Great feedback, and the old adage garbage in, garbage out definitely applies to our smart watering features (weather, zone characteristics, etc.).

I’ll work with the customer support team on how we can help with the onboarding process, at least manually until we can automate a lot of the zone setup features.

:cheers:

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