Rachio 16-Zone Smart Sprinkler Controller

This really does save water. And it does what you program it to do. This is all the more important because I am in South East Florida and we water 52 weeks a year down here. First, things to consider: If you expect to just connect the low voltage wires to your sprinkler valves to this device, plug in the AC power unit, spend a few minutes setting up the WiFi, zones and schedules (which is easy to do), and be done with it you will probably be unhappy. I have spent many hours tweaking the settings on this device, but for me it is worth spending the time to make this thing really work. Also, it does rely on Internet access, but if your Internet goes down, I have read it will continue to run the "last saved schedule", but I have not tested that. The Rachio server(s) run on Amazon's AWS servers so they should be reliable. Be sure you have a decent WiFi signal at the location you intend to install the controller. If you install outdoors, be sure and purchase the outdoor enclosure. When using the outdoor enclosure, you do not use the cover that comes with the controller. Only use the cover that comes with the controller for indoor installations. Last, if Rachio goes out of business, and the server(s) are no longer functional, the Rachio controller will be of no use. However, should that ever happen, I know I will have saved many times the cost of the Rachio device in water bills, and really do not find that a concern. Now on to the benefits of using this controller....... Coming from another WiFi controller that kept making changes to my schedules on its own (it would add extra start times, running the same schedule twice, three times, even four times in one day), I find the Rachio is highly advanced. Rachio knows the past rainfall and looks ahead at the weather and so far has not been wrong. So it knows the exact amount of rain that has fallen, which is much more accurate than those rain sensors. I could never get mine to work very well, even after a torrential rain, the rain sensor would dry out after about 12 hours, and often my system would run even though the ground was saturated. This has completely eliminated the system running when it is not necessary. The way this works is the Rachio can be configured to look at the closest weather station. In my case I have had a Davis Vantage Vue weather station at my house since 2011, and it was not too complicated to make it report to pwsweather which once done became a weather station that was on the list of stations available to my Rachio (see attached photo). (This weather station is on the roof of my house, but I have purposely set its location slightly off to protect the anonymity of my house.) I am told by Rachio that besides the information reported by my weather station, it uses 30 years of weather history in making the forecasts it uses to determine if it should run a schedule or not. Another thing I like is that the Rachio can be configured to skip a schedule if it is too windy. In the past I have seen my water just blown away and wasted when it is too windy to water. Besides the above features, the Rachio allows configuration of each zone for the type of plants or grass, spray head type, soil type, sun exposure, slope, and other details, and can be set for the Rachio to completely determine when it should water a zone. You can set the usual schedule to water for a certain length of time on certain days, and the Rachio will do that, and will skip if you have had rain or high winds. Or you can use what Rachio calls Flex Daily Schedules, which will only water once Rachio determines it is necessary to do this by calculating the moisture remaining in the ground. It does this by knowing the type of soil, plant type root depth, sprinkler head type, sun exposure, temperature, evaporation, rainfall, and probably several other things, and it determines when a zone should water. Depending on all this, different zones can run on different days. At this time I have a lot of new sod and a new a new podocarpus hedge that is watered with a drip line that need more frequent watering than established landscape and am running fixed schedules on the 4 zones that water these areas -- that is schedules that run my zones at specific times on specific days. But I am allowing the Rachio to skip these schedules due to rain or wind. The rest of my zones are being watered with the Flex Daily schedule. Rachio knows my rainfall, irrigation, evaporation, and based on all the attributes I mentioned above calculates when a zone should run. For fixed schedules Rachio also looks 7 days in the past at the actual rainfall, and 7 days into the future for forecast rain, then takes into consideration the soil type, sun exposure, vegetation type, temperature, and determines if there is enough water in the soil to justify skipping a schedule. This is called a "saturation skip". It can take some work to properly configure a system to have the correct soil types, and other data that the system needs to correctly make these calculations and saturation skip can be turned off if you do not have the necessary data, such as you are too far from a weather station for this to work correctly, but if the data is available this can also save a considerable amount of water. For Flex Daily Schedules, Rachio basically relies on similar information to keep track of how much water is in the soil and used that information alone to determine when a zone should water. It does other good things to. One thing I like is it has a feature called "Smart Cycle" which will pause the watering of a zone after so long (depending on a number of factors such as soil type) to allow the water to soak in, then after the pause resume watering that zone. Besides the iPhone app, you can access your Rachio from your PC or Mac using a browser. In my case, I use Safari on my iMac when I am in my home office. And once you poke around the various screens, Rachio has organized everything very neatly into zones and schedules that makes configuring and tweaking the system easy once you get the hang of it. It also contains help screens which go into considerable depth explaining how each setting works. The app (and browser version) is modern in its thorough but simple approach and even allows you to take photos of each zone to make it easy to remember which zone controls which area of your yard. All in all I highly recommend Rachio and believe it will save many times the cost of the device in water bills, while keeping my grass and plants healthy. Obviously, the more accurate the weather data that Rachio has available to it, the better it will work at saving water, and having your own personal weather station (accurately calibrated and properly installed) is the ultimate way to do this. But even with weather information from the NWS, it is still a very good irrigation timer and will do a great job.