Network outage no watering sadness :(

We went on a trip for 12 days. It looks like the Rachio disconnected from our wireless network on day 2 and never reconnected. I don’t know if any watering was done at all. The grass is brown and dead.

We were using the flex daily watering schedule. Is it supposed to water the grass if the internet goes out?

Really loved the Rachio but this could be a deal breaker. Not going to recommend it, if there is no backup plan.

If you have a flex schedule and the Rachio goes offline, what will occur is that 24 hours after your Rachio goes offline we will initiate our “backup flex schedule.” If you had your flex schedule set to run every day, it will default to every 3 days and run on the predetermined start time that you set for this schedule. If you had specific days based on restrictions, we will continue to run on those allowed days as well as at the predetermined start time.

If you had some sort of blackout or something to that effect where no power was being supplied to the Rachio, it would not be able to run at all.

My guess is that the every 3 day backup schedule may not have been enough to keep up with the loss of moisture to those zones while the device was offline. If you are still worried about this sort of thing while you are away, I would suggest having a fixed interval “vacation schedule”, which you could turn on when you leave for extended periods. If the Rachio loses internet connection but has a fixed schedule, it will just run that exact programmed schedule using its onboard memory.

This is another scenario where I wish the Rachio had a Z-Wave+ radio within it. You would be able to locally log when it ran, what zones, time per zone, etc… without being reliant on the Internet service aspect of Rachio. You could even program your home automation to detect the Internet outage and then run Racho manually if its fallback schedules aren’t to your liking.

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