Well, glad to hear there is a need being voiced. Us little grape farmers with a handful of acres who jumped on rachio 4 years ago and installed 60+ station worth of rachio (and added more later to deal with low pump pressure and tank capacity = many valves) are still waiting.
I wrote in this community topic ~2 years ago. The result was I was BLASTED by Franz because while he promised for way over a year of posts and messages the future with multiple controllers being managed as one was coming soon with the new software code base, yet when I asked about it I was told in no uncertain words that it did not make business sense, implying that my 6 (now 7) controllers did not matter and that it would not happen. No âIâm sorry for leading you all onâ. No âwe will keep tryingâ. Just a body slam.
Now that is customer service. not.
For the fist 2 years I owned 4x 16 station controllers I told everyone I knew in the sprawling residential areas near my property how GREAT rachio was. After being told to piss off by the co-founder, I stopped speaking about the product or the brand. Period. I still use it. I restored it after the Woolsey fire burnt through my land and my vineyard saved my house. Replaced melted valves, wiring and controller boxes. But I am still not flying the flag for rachio. Why? Go back to that customer service topic above.
I hope someday I will again want to sing the praises. it isnât even about the multiple controller management that was âthe planâ. It remains about the way it was handled from the top. Was expecting to be treated as early adopter - IE ever hopeful, not like the âmarksâ who spend a lot of money and then were pushed to the curb.
PS - Franz, I have gone to Denver every month for the past 2 years. You invited me to come visit way back when the company was new and the promise of combining controllers was âthe planâ. Somehow I just donât see the reason to come by. My loss.
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Add me to the list who would like to link multiple controllers or even just a controller with 24 zones. I purchased one Rachio a few years back at the recommendation of our landscaping company. They installed it for my home which has 18 zones. They combined 1 zone with another, and then put a separate âdumbâ controller on the final zone which was added in later years. They just installed a second controller so I would have control over everything, but they were not aware of the limitation on having multiple controllers. I am now in the same boat as many others. I live in a neighborhood with around 25 homes, with almost all of those having just as many zones or more than me. I am the only one with a Rachio controller, but I bet more would be customers if this zone limit was addressed.
I understand looking at your existing customer base to determine how to allocate R&D, but it might be erroneous to do so as you might not be taking into account potential new customer base if you add this feature, especially at a higher cost than existing units. A similar scenario to compare could if Amazon had said 10 years ago that they werenât gong to put any resources into its third-party sellers platform because it made up such a small percentage of its overall revenue (now it makes up around half), or if Amazon or Microsoft decided 10 years ago not to invest in cloud resources because it is such a small percentage of overall revenue. That would have been a lot of lost revenue potential for each company. Those examples are extremely different scales, and Iâm sure there are much better examples others could come up with. Hopefully my point is clear.
I really like the product, the general ease of use, but really could use a 24 zone controller, or at least the ability to integrate my two existing controllers.
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I agree that this feature needs to be added. I have 2 Rachio controllers, a 2 and a 3. I just added #3 since I needed more zones for my yard. When will Rachio provide the merging of 2 or more controller schedules together as 1 combined schedule?
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