Smart sprinkler timer failed open and ran for up to 24 hours

I got my hose timer in the first wave of shipments and have been running it ever since. when i did check up on it everything seemed to be working well.

about 2 hours ago I found my garden box drip irrigation system running and hyper saturated and the hose timer stuck in the on position. pressing the blue button couldn’t close the valve. holding the blue button resulted in a light pattern that wasn’t described in the online documentation (cycling yellow/green before strobing red for a second).

after talking with chat it seems that this can happen “if the timer/hub(?) loses connection to the “app” (server?) and that the physical button itself can’t even stop things in such a case.” which only raised more red flags for me.

The app showed a solid connection but whenever i tried a quick run it would silently time out without an error. after being asked to uninstall and reinstall the rachio app things started working like expected.

I’m still really not sure what happened, and more importantly why this could happen. i don’t know why hub / app (server?) access is needed to use the manual blue button… or why the unit is capable of running open for more than an hour or two under any circumstance. it’s all just left a bad taste in my mouth that hasn’t been explained away yet.

i strongly disliked my b-hyve hose controllers. the app was total hell, but they never failed into the on state at least.

I wanted to post this here because i didn’t see anything else on the subject and while i feel betrayed and unable to trust my timer i’m hoping i get some sort of clear resolution that reassures me this wont happen again.

until then, i’m turning my hose bib off every weekend and ahead of any trips.