Rachio

Back in the day, I remember dragging a hose around the yard and watering it in the middle of the day. What a pain in the butt.

Olden days

Ok, so it wasn’t that long ago when I lived with my parents growing up and I remember dragging a hose around the .50 acre of land. Yes, it was a big pain in the butt. First of all, you had to remember to go move the water, that was hard. You know you get busy watching cartoons, or playing or reading a book. We didn’t have this thing called the internet, we had things to do in our lives.

When I moved into my first house, we put in a sprinkler system and it was nice. Put the auto timer on forget about it, well sort of. I usually watered at night, but sometimes it would come on at 4 PM for 20 min. What? Yea, it was a pain in the butt. I came home from a trip and it was hot outside and the sprinklers were only watering for like 5 min a zone at 4 PM every day. I think the power went out and it reset to that time. Because or clocks were flashing. I thought this was supposed to make my life easier. It would also run if it was raining.

What do you do

As I am shaking my head and sitting there night after night, getting no sleep,  thinking of something to do to fix this issue. I wasn’t getting any sleep due to this issue. I wasn’t up nights thinking about it. I knew what I needed to do and that was to change out the sprinkler system timer box. But with what? Since we are in a technology era, there has to be some smart tech out there that can do the following:

• Run at the times you indicate
• Don’t water in the rain
• Don’t reset when power goes out
• Don’t water in the wind
• Control it from your smart phone.

Found it

I found the one I wanted, it could do all of the above, well, it still has an issue when it is raining, I have seen it water still. Looking into this. But the ability to control my phone was a must due to my nerdiness.

What did I find?

The Rachio

Yes, the Rachio, whose mission statement states

“Making sustainable water use effortless and personally rewarding.”

“A rainy day sparked an idea to revolutionize how we water lawns. That idea has grown into Rachio – your partner in caring for your lawn, and the planet, the right way!”

Find out more here (https://rachio.com/mission/

Watch the video

What I like about this is that I can walk around with my iPhone in my hand and control the sprinklers via an app so I can see if they are having an issue.

The App

The app comes on the iPhone and Android, the iPhone app looks like this

The app is always getting better and better, you can set up different schedules for different things. Like right now, I have new grass coming in and I water 4 times a day. I have four different schedules set up. So I can disable one of them if needed. Which is nice. It will not water if there is wind, but I still have to figure out the watering in the rain thing. It started to water when the rain was down pouring.

I like the app like I said before it is getting better all the time. It does have a sharing feature as well. My neighbor went out of town and shared his Rachio Controller with me and I was able to control their sprinklers since I fixed some of the heads for them due to their dog ripping them up right before they left. I know I am a good neighbor.

Overall feeling

I did upgrade to a Rachio 3 with 12 zones, got this one from Costco and I really like it. It has been a lifesaver and helped keep my stress down about watering. I have a drip line and I can set that up separately and it can water when it needs to.

The first one I brought it took my wife about a year to notice this blue light shining in the garage, yes you can turn that off if you would like. I was able to place this in my garage the first time. But this time around, it is on the side of my house. I really like this device, now if I can just get this to stop watering in the rain it would be great.