I’ve been using Rachio for a year now and it’s truly a disappointing user interaction. The Hardware is adequate, but the UI… UGH!
suggestions:
Web interface. Would be great to configure the system using a web browser.
The ability to adjust zones in a table would be great, why do I have to go into each program (schedule) individually? Why not just display all the zones in a table with the: start time, duration, repeat interval, smart function on/off, % adjustment (if not smart)., etc.
the ability to adjust in minutes and seconds. Seems trivial for most people, but here in San Diego, I run some zones just for a minute or two. So the rachio adjustments actually don’t adjust, for example I have a 2 minute zone. When it changes, there is not enough granularity to adjust, so it sends me an email saying we adjusted from 2 mintues to 2 minutes. #1 don’t send such a stupid email, #2 please make adjustments in % and then make that change, eg. we cut your watering cycle 50% so it was 3 minutes now it’s 1 minute 3 seconds. Come on folks, Alexa can tell me jokes and you guys can’t manage to do minutes and seconds? WHY???
Ok, if you actually pay attention to this user feedback I’ll be amazed, and if you do I’ll give more feedback!
Thanks for taking the time to leave feedback on our product. I want to make sure I address all of your points!
We do actually have a web interface, and you can access it at app.rach.io
I do agree that editing time on each zone can be tedious with our current UI. The hope is that users are not often having to change their run times, but I agree there could be improvements on this experience.
While we do not allow for seconds adjustments, we do adjust by a percentage with our seasonal shift feature. So when you are getting that misleading email you mentioned, you are most likely actually adjusting up or down by some number of seconds. This is not intuitive, and needs improvement.
I will make sure to relay your feedback to our team, let me know if I can answer any additional questions.
@mckynzee - for item 1 I think @98mkiv is asking for the web interface to be on par with the iOS or Android application as I believe there are still things that can only done on the iOS or Android application.
Well, thanks! It’s great to see a timely reply and thanks for pointing me to the web interface!
for point #2 I’d really like to see a tabular dashboard for the zones on a single webpage (or phone app)… would be great to be able to:
edit the zone name
edit the group name
edit which zones are in the group
toggle a group on/off
toggle a zone in a group on/off
adjust start time
adjust duration
toggle “smart schedule” which means the weather impacts that zone, or disabled would just be a straight duration with a % adjustment SEE the % seasonal shift for a particular zone (how the rachio advantage works, should be easily visable)
@98mkiv Rachio pays attention. I hope you were amazed.
Their feedback and response time is the best I’ve ever seen for an irrigation product. Their product support pages also have a plethora of helpful info to become more in tune with the platform and irrigation in general.
I totally agree, I was really suprprised. Generally commercial/industrial product support forums are rarely staffed and if so a generic answer deferring any action is usually the case. So to get a thoughtful reply that actually helped (the link to the web app!) really was refreshing. It certainly improves my perception of the brand. Now if we actually see the commentary of this forum applied to feature enhancements, that will be really great.
I didn’t find any other recent feature request threads so thought I’d post here.
Request: offline mode. Host a local webserver on the controller allowing configuration via a browser/app without needing an internet connection. It could sync with the rachio cloud when it’s available.
This is similar to the OPs #1 request, but on the local wireless network.
