Thanks for the feedback. I’ll look more at the flow meter usage to see if I might use in the future. As for Skydrop, I just looked at my activation and it was only 5/2017. Forgot I bought around good Friday and sat on it until Spring. So only 1 good year. What I haven’t liked about it are:
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Support is poor. I’ve never called because it lines up squarely with my work hours. Email or in app messages take days (took 4 business days this tome) for responses and the responses havent been of quality. Last year was no help and this year the jury is still out.
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UI on the device is very slow and clunky to deal with. Not a big deal since I almost never use it. UI in app is better, but still clunky.
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App UI can be confusing. For example if it waters this morning it will show watering the same zones tomorrow until about half way through the day, sometimes into the evening. I find I am double checking it a lot which is the antithesis of a good smart device.
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Seems to over water a good bit even when I dialed down the range all the way to the bottom. I had to manually reset the schedule and duration baseline by a pretty wide margin. It now seems to be respecting that.
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Weather data has always been less than accurate, but this year has been really bad. Missed 2 substantial rains and several smaller ones. Yesterday morning it ran 2 zones even though it was predicting an inch of rain during the day. . . . which we easily got. Part of this is that you can only set a zip code and not address. I think my town has pretty varied weather patters based off looking at weather underground stations. This is my critical issue. If it’s not countining the benefit of the rain, it’s use drops significantly. I’m not sure how well it reacts to the weather data it does have, but seems ok to me.
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It has no user forum. Last year during setup I had questions on settings and when I reached out to help, didn’t really get any. Would have been great to poll a user base.
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It can’t do my towns water restrictions which are twice a week. I don’t think Rachio can either, but I haven’t come accross one that can yet. To handle this I try to manage settings so that each zone won’t run more than every 4 days which means it won’t run more than once in a given calendar week. Not quite the restriction since each zone is independent, but I figure it’s in the spirit of the rule. I actually was going to write the town to suggest this, but figured I wouldn’t draw attention to my self.