My new rachio 16 zone controller is intended for use in Panama, where weather forecasts are not useful. After I Blink Up and program the controller, is an internet connection necessary to simply turn the water to the various zones on and off?
@michaelmullin Yes, currently all communication and automatic scheduling, virtual rain sensor, etc. is performed from our cloud infrastructure.
At some point we might have a way to ‘locally’ control the device but not on our immediate road map.
Thanks, let us know if you have any more questions, and have a great day!
Does your response imply that watering schedules will not work if there is an internet service outage? We experience outages more often than I would be comfortable with, it that is the case.
Hi @DanielROlson,
Thanks for reaching out. If/when there is an internet service outage, the Iro will run the last saved schedule it received from the Rachio cloud. Please note, while it said state, the Iro will loose it’s intelligence (i.e. no weather check/virtual rain sensor, automated seasonal adjustments, remote control, etc), but it will default to a basic timer setting and continue to water the zones until it reconnects to WiFi to update the schedules.
I hope this helps.
Best, Emil
I recommend you guys prioritize a local-only mode. Look at the recent incident that Wink poorly managed. Not saying that something as catastrophic will happen, but people will have more peace of mind.
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@banksw68 Thanks for the feedback. It is unfortunate what happened at Wink, the next few years will be interesting in the IoT space 
I remember Nest having to recall quite a few smoke alarms a while back, so it can happen to even the largest of companies. Local-only mode is not an easy problem to solve from a resource perspective, but solvable. Duly noted, and thanks again for the feedback. Have a great night.
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Sorry to beat a dead horse here, but are you saying there is no way to adjust settings unless the unit can reach your servers? I’m shopping around for a new timer, but I’d rather keep it within my local network, even though that means losing the weather feature. And, if I’m understanding your replies correctly, if your company was to disappear for whatever reason, I’d have a brick on my hands, correct?
@gdstark Correct. Even if you could use a local mode, the controller itself would be a glorified timer at that point 
The cloud strategy is really no different than Wink, SmartThings, etc. approach to remote command and control. I know RainMachine is ‘local’ if that is one of your main concerns. Being cloud based allows us to do far more things with our software then would be possible if it solely ran on the controller.
Thanks and have a great day!