I installed a Rachio Generation 3 recently for my yard. I previously had a Rainmachine which died.
My initial impressions of Rachio are less than positive. What I liked about Rainmachine is you could set specific days to water, and it would gently adjust the watering duration for the schedule based on current weather conditions (considering temperature, hours of sunshine, any rainfall, etc). The adjustments were reasonable and appropriate. It would use the designated amount of time as the “max” (assuming hot weather) and adjust it to be somewhat less than the max whenever weather allowed.
I have watering restrictions that only allow watering two days per week so can only use the “Fixed” schedule and cannot comment on flex schedules. I have enabled most of the weather intelligence features but have disabled “Seasonal Shift” because have found it overrides schedule times in unpredicable ways with times that are too high are low.
Another complaint: you can’t set up different schedules for different times of the year, therefore it looks like I can going to have to manually change the schedule times several times a year.
I am sure the Rachio iis sophisticated, however, to me the interface seems too basic. It takes too much background control over decisions and does not allow the user to control and customize processes.
Is there any way to make the Rachio more like Rainmachine and have it water for a set duration that can change based on current conditions to some degree but not too much and give the user control over how much it can adjust watering times?