I just moved from 2+ years on Skydrop and 30+ years on multiple others (Hunter, Rainbird, Toro, etc)… surprised, and concerned, Rachio is missing some basic Schedule options.
If I’m incorrect, please let me know, I’m new but I have spent time looking/trying…
Hourly intervals, 1/2/4/6 hours, is not really helpful or practical unless there is a condition for 'between hours of". I dont see any reason anyone would want to water every hour, 24hrs a day. Plus, only allowing every 6 hours at most is really poor form. If you are not going to allow time frame conditions, at least provide users ability to put in ANY hourly interval… 3, 8, 10, 12, 15, etc
No way to add a single schedule for specific times (like: 9am, Noon, 3pm)?
… Gardens, Lawn Seeing/Overseeding, Small additional amounts of water for specific zones, etc.
Editing Schedules is missing many options.
… I just found that there were options not available when editing a Schedule, that are available when creating from new. got it thanks. Any option should be able to be edited. Schedules should not need to delete and recreated to change any part of a schedule. This is a clear miss, and very confusing to users I’m sure.
I work for a software company, I understand what it takes to do these things and I’m not trivializing the effort but if a 20 year old $5 irrigation controller can do it, but Rachio can’t after a few years of development – something is not right.
Agreed, we are missing “between hours of”. There is a simple workaround using a manual cycle/soak if you are interested. I would like to revisit this but we have higher priority initiatives that the team is working towards.
I need more context to understand the use case. We do allow creation of single schedules…you can use one time, disable, but still run ad-hoc if you would like.
Agreed, but creating a new schedule is a very small task. The majority of our customers have 1.5 schedules. Allowing to change into different schedule types is a lot of additional development to support and is not prioritized.
Not an entirely apples/apples comparison but I understand your point.
Thanks for the feedback and if you have additional questions (other than the above) please let us know.
More context, sure. These are not one-time use, they last weeks (over seeding) or 6-8 months long (garden) – Manual on/off defeats the purpose of buying Rachio. There are several use cases for this single feature…
Veggie Garden needs watering 2x a day
Sun-down *cool after being beaten by strong afternoon sun, which also drys out the, far more exposed, soil
Morning.
Schedule should be: 7 minutes, twice at day at 8am and 6pm.
Over Seeding Lawn needs watering 3x a day
need to keep seeds & soil moist all-day, never dry out. different places on earth have different sun patterns and lawns have different shade situations so users need ability to set the exact times, not simply every N hours.
my situation will be different on Front yard vs Back yard, back gets far more shade until late afternoon so it get beat with hot sun. front is opposite.
Front Schedule: 5 minutes, 6am, 2pm, 8pm.
Back Schedule: 5 minutes, 10am, 4pm, 8pm.
I’m sure other users have other use cases, as well as these. These are things I could easily do with SkyDrop and other controllers.
In making your schedule, you select Manual Cycle and Soak, then specify the Cycle time (max time watering at once) and Soak time (time waiting between cycles). If you want 30 minutes every 2 hours, you’d specify a 30 minute Cycle time and 120 minute Soak time. It will keep alternating until the total minutes of watering is applied.
