Installation Experience, Tips, and Comments

This discussion hopefully is used by folks to log their install experience and any tips and questions

Model: 16 zones
Replaced: Hunter Pro C with wireless rain sensor
Zones: 12 zone controller was driving 13 zones (2 zones connected to one pin)

Had retained the Hunter Pro C’s manual and that was very helpful to understand the connections. Would recommend that you look up your old controller’s manual online (if you have not retained the print copy).
My controller had umpteen connections, took some time to understand. Capturing some of them

Left side:

Power cable went to a little box inside the controller box. On top of that there was a transformer which had wires coming out to pins above. Had six connectors on the left side:

  • Top 2 pins were connected to rain sensor,
  • Next one was the remote control pin (this is the remote control that sprinkler system folks use to control from any where around the house). This is not needed with Iro (since you can control using App from anywhere)
  • Next two were 24 V pins: Rain sensor power wires were connected to this as well as the remote control related power wires. Note that there were wires coming from the Transformer to these two pins as well
  • Next pin had a wire coming from transformer side

Right Side:

Had 14 connection points on the right side.
Pins from bottom most pin to top

Bottom post pin 1: Common
Pin 2: Master valve control
Pin 3: zone 1 connection
Pin 4 to Pin 14: zone 2 to 12 connections

My builder had used wires for zones that were of varied colors without any sequence or such.

Other notes:

  • Labeled all the wires and removed them. Took photos
  • Iro’s slot at the bottom to glide the wires gave me some problems. I had not screwed Iro before sliding in wires. May be doing otherwise could be easier
  • You can setup wifi password using blimp inside home
  • Use a dark room to configure through blimp
  • Used a 7" Samsung tablet: Blimp did not succeed. While blimping the wifi red led blinking would stop, but afterwards would return
  • Used Samsung Galaxy S4 to do blimp and that succeeded
  • If your router supports both 5 Ghz and 2.4 Ghz channels. Ensure that the phone is on the 2.4 Ghz one
  • Blimp process does require you to enter the wireless key. So note down the same and then start the blimp process. If you fail in blimp process, you might have to reenter the code to retry

Some questions I had queried Rachio support and gotten answers:

Question 1: If Rachio were to go out of business, what happens to server(cloud in RACHIO that works with weather stations to act on rainy days etc) that feeds updates to various Iros ?
Answer: In the event we go out of business, the servers would keep running until we could find a buyer to carry the product forward. Please note that no new features would be developed during this time.

Question 2. What is the server capability?
Answer: We can scale to millions of users.

Question 3. Will there be a monthly subscription fee later on?
Answer: We will never add a monthly subscription for current features or any other basic features that make the Iro smart and help save water.

1 Like