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Rachio not trying to connect to wifi after initial failure

Troubleshooting Wi-Fi
#1

Each morning the Rachio 3 is ‘offline’, then I physically turn it off and on, and it works.

The use case is very well understood.

My router with mesh restart each day at 3 am, all my 60 devices at home works fine after that except Rachio!

My guess is that the Rachio see the slave mesh router after the restart of the main router, try to connect, it doesn’t work (yet), and then just give up.

It would be nice of the Rachio’s software developer do the same thing that is done done when I turn it off and on when it’s offline for more than 20 minutes.

In other words, I would like a watchdog that try to fix things when Rachio is not connected to Wifi, and a thing to do should be to try again!

#2

Totally agree. I have the same issue. My router seems to drop the 2.4 GHz wifi daily. Every other device I have recovers except for the Rachio. Would seem to be a simple fix to replace me manually resetting the device with a bit of code to continue to try to reconnect.

#3

The watchdog timer is a good idea. I hope they add this to the firmware in the near future.

On purpose? That could interrupt a 911 call, or just mess up the video you are watching because you can’t sleep. If your router has a memory leak that bad, others have likely reported it; check whether newer firmware is available that fixes the trouble.

If not intentional, perhaps your ISP is doing some maintenance at that time and the router is rebooting itself hoping that it will ‘fix’ the outage. You may have a setting to inhibit that.

Possibly, one or both APs are changing channel after a restart. Make sure that neither is set to ‘automatic’; choose channel 1, 6, or 11, whichever has the least interference. If your demanding devices (phones, tablets, etc.) connect reliably on 5 GHz, set the 2.4 GHz channel on both APs the same. This will reduce 2.4 GHz performance slightly when multiple devices are simultaneously active, but should result in a more stable system.

If no luck and your system supports it, create a new SSID just for Rachio, 2.4 GHz only, and present only on the AP closest to your controller.

If still no luck, consider a device such as https://www.amazon.com/Sonoff-Certified-Compatible-Assistant-Supporting/dp/B08GKJ87M5/ . You can set it up as a timer, or run a script somewhere to reboot the Rachio if it’s not responding.

#4

Yes, restarting at 3 am is on purpose. I’m a software engineer. How many times you restarted a computer to get rid of a current issue? Imagine, now you restart your computer and it’s worst after, would you be surprised? This is Rachio behavior. Very few device are worst on restart, but I did had a doorbell having a similar issue, I had time to detect that lemon during the return window to get rid of it.

#5

Ha! I submitted a Product Suggestion for the watchdog about 3 weeks ago! Please “like” it so the developers get a hint.