so, at risk of sounding like a fan boy, im still going to post this in case there are potential customers like me that lurk the forums for a little while in an attempt to debunk any marketing hype behind a product. please feel free to add your own wins to this thread.
before i purchased my rachio i was using a hunter pro c controller. not a bad controller but required me to science the shit out of the device if i were to make any type of schedule changes. after 7 years of dialing in this device to work with my counties extortion based tiered water pricing model, i decided that i was tired of walking about 50 yards to turn on my irrigation controller, walk 50 yards back to my drip zone to look for missing emitters or punctured drip line, then walk 50 yards back to the controller to turn it off, walk 50 yards back to the problem spots, fix them, then walk 50 yards back to the controller, turn it on, then walk 50 yards back to the repair locations to verify.
because i have 4 big dogs that love to destroy my drip system, this became all too frequent. enter it iro, i research all of the smart controllers out there, settled on the iro because of forum activity.
after about 1 hour of playing with the device to understand how to properly configure my yard, the iro drilled my setup almost perfectly. the iro scheduled a few extra minutes for per zone than what i had settled on with my pro c but i was shocked/impressed. i felt this to be a big win for devices transevap/accumulation algorithms and this literally took me an hour of playing around. huge win in my book (there is some confusion caused by the poor visualization of how long a zone actually runs).
second win that keeps on giving over my previous controller, touch of back story, my wife is beyond frugal, she is cheap, she is an accountant, not a single penny enters/leaves this household unaccounted for (its brutal). my wife now loves this device because at least 5 times a month, there have been notifications on our phones that iro skipped the schedule because of forecaster precipitation in my area. A HUGE WIN IN THE ACCOUNTING DEPARTMENT.
the last success story for me occurred 2 weeks ago. i had my turf top dressed with 3 of my other neighbors. the top dressing company started a day earlier because of forecasted rain and none of us had marked our heads. because i convinced 2 of my neighbors to switch to the iro, i was able to call them and have them turn on each zone for 1 minute while i run around and mark the heads while 1 of neighbors had to come home from work to mark his heads. A huge win but it doesnt stop there. on my hunter pro c i had maxed out my schedules to provide the same behavior as the smart cycle feature on the iro provides and would have had to water my top dressed zones manually each day until the sand could be held in place…on my iro, it took about 2 minutes to setup 1 new schedule to water my top dressed zones every morning for a week.
i also just convinced another neighbor to get the device (helping him install it this weekend) because he was on vacation last week and needed to turn off his irrigation because of our rain forecast (rain sensor not sufficient). well i had to go over and close his master valve by hand for him (because i dont like going into ppl’s houses when they are not home) whereas if he had the iro it wouldnt have been an issue, and if it was an issue he could have just disabled the system via his cell phone.
LAST BUT NOT LEAST, it’s so satisfying to be able to flip the irrigation on quickly when i see my kids in the yard, a neighbors dog or hell, even the neighbor, their look of confusion is priceless.
sorry for the long post, i guess im a fan boy