Rachio should do residential Lanscape lighting controllers

I started using Rachio earlier this year for my irrigation controller and have been pretty impressed with the software capability and it’s ease of use. I have noticed a huge difference over my old controller and the ultimate results in my yard.

I found myself wishing the other day that Rachio also leveraged their software capability and made a residential landscape lighting controller. I need a new one.

I was wondering if anyone in this forum had good experience with a brand of lighting controller that would provide Rachio like ease of use and wifi capability only for lights of course. Or maybe wishful thinking that Rachio has this in the works. :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the suggestion and I’m glad to see you are enjoying our software.

Realistically, you can make any dumb lighting controller smart by using a smart plug. Anything from Z-wave, Zigbee, or even wifi will work depending on what, if any other smart systems you have in your home. Zigbee and wifi will work with a number of Alexa home hub products, and Zwave would need a more dedicated smarthome hub like Smartthings.

thanks. I have several smart home products and a hub but it’s about the software specific to the use case though… tracking DST, sunsets, sunrises, schedules, season shifts, zones, effects, etc. I’ll checkout what you’ve suggested. Thanks again.

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@deludlow - my landscaper put in a dumb light controller - it had a photoelectric eye to turn on and a few settings for how long it should run (on, off, light controlled or a set number of hours when it was dark). I set it to On and then put a Wemo smart outdoor plug with a turn on time of x minutes before sunset and a fixed time to turn off. I then added an IFTTT trigger based on sunlight brightness reported by my Tempest weather station to take care of turning on the lights when it gets very cloudy/dark before sunset.

That’s how I solved my problem - YMMV.

@deludlow

Check out the Letzgo Products landscape lighting zone controller. It integrates with the Rachio controller.