We’re a Landscape Design/Build Firm in Southern Oregon, and just installed our first Iro last week.
I believe our typical client differs from Consumers buying the Rachio on Amazon, in that, while they like the idea of the Nest, Z-Wave, Philips Hue (many of our Customers use these), they may not be interested in the on-going management of these products. The Nest, for example, has a very simple UX - it’s a knob.
Irrigation Systems are nuanced, often complex, and changing significantly season-over-season. Many landscape retrofits are a mess of mixed-precipitation nozzles, non-existent hydrozoning, and poor hydraulic design. Our Customers pay us to manage their systems for them. These are a segment of the population that have little interest in Allowable Depletion, Plant Coefficients, Lower Quarter DUs, or Precipitation Rates.
They like the idea of remotely turning their systems on while they are on vacation. They love the metrics and the email notifications. We expect that they would rather leave the system design and technical work to us.
After this initial installation, there are some obvious improvements that could be made on the software side:
- Installation Professionals need to have Full Access permissions to a Customer’s controller via a separate login;
- The Professional login should allow us access to every delegated controller under our purview;
- Customers should retain the ability to revoke our access at any time.
- Customers should be able to enforce a ‘Watering Window’, that would prevent us from triggering their systems during an important event;
- Customers should be able to submit Service Tickets to us for broken nozzles, adjustments, etc., which would be visible upon login, or sent via email notification.
- While the mobile apps are great for in-field work, the web login would be our primary access to delegated systems - adjusting the ‘Advanced’ settings throughout the establishment of the landscape.
In our case, we offer a full warranty and monitoring service for all of our Customers for two years after the date of installation. During this period, we would need the ability to manage their systems for them, run IFTTT rules for our own purposes, etc. Many Customers stick with us for years after their initial service agreement expires.
I would LOVE to see some or all of these improvements made before the 2015 irrigation season gets into full swing - we plan on installing hundreds of these.