Rachio - 8-zone 3rd Generation Smart Sprinkler Controller

I have been impressed by our Rachio since our purchase. After a few months of usage i can tell that our water usage has reduced which is the main point! No more do i have to wake up at 3am to turn off the sprinklers when its raining. I have been using the daily flex setting and it has done a great job thus far. Also the ability to manage from afar while on travel is really nice. I would recommend this to anyone. Will take a bit of getting used to as its not particularly easy to run the system from the unit itself. Easiest to use a smart phone, which is a change from normal, but not to terrible once you are used to it. Integration with google home is only minimal (doesn't show up in your home). You have to ask google to talk to "Rachio" and then you can interface. A bit annoying and we haven't used it much. Would like to have ability to control through google home app, so i don't need so many apps on my phone for various devices.

I purchased this product so that I could easily monitor and schedule the days that I water my lawn. In Michigan we never know when we are going to get rain. Sometimes it's few and far between and other days it will happen for multiple days consecutively. The install for this was very easy (just take a picture of current set up before you disconnect all of your wires). Setting up everything through the app took a while but that is only because it asks for a lot of details that helps it create a schedule. Once you program what you want (or even what it recommends) you just sit back and let it do the work for you. I have had it installed for about a little over a week. I have it set to water every other day. So far, it has only watered my lawn once and canceled the watering on three other days because it predicted rain. All three days that it cancelled, we ended up getting rain so it saved me the water and the money. The app is very user friendly and make it easy to check the schedule make adjustments and see how much time and water that you saved. This was well worth the investment.

This is the controller to get for tech lovers. Even for those that aren’t techy but have Wi-Fi and just love to save water and/or money, this is it. I live in Florida which rains every summer afternooon, and it’s nice to have this thing skip scheduled runs based off of local weather forecast rather than a rain sensor. The rain sensor wasn’t an option for me cuz that’s just another thing that can collect standing water and attract mosquitos. It predicts how many inches of rain your lawn has gotten and will skip runs if it passes the threshold you set. Set up is very easy. You can name each zone, take a picture of each zone, and describe whether it’s mostly shrubs, trees or lawn and what type of soil you have etc. It asked a lot more details than I even cared to wonder about. Once set up is complete, you can practically forget about changing your irrigation schedule. I have already noticed a 20% reduction in water usage and it hasn’t even been a full month since I’ve used this.

Almost too many options but once you get it setup, it's nice to be able to control the irrigation system from your phone, web, or Alexa. Install time was right around 30-45 min. The main issue I had was not enough wire lead from my previous system, not any issue of Rachio. The phone and web app to me does seem a little ambiguous and takes a little trial and error to setup because you don't quite know if it's going to do what you want it to do till you review the history. Some watering options lock you into a specific schedule and you can't manually change so you have to setup again using a different method to gain more flexibility. But as stated, once you figure what works for you and setup, you can just let it go. Auto seasonal adjustments are nice but again, you have to let go and trust Rachio to do the right thing.

I recently purchased the Rachio Gen 3. It's placed outside, so also bought the outdoor enclosure. Both were easy to physically install ( I was replacing another sprinkler controller.) I did have to call the support line several times due to issues with WiFi connecting to the device. They were helpful on the phone and follow-up call. Once the Rachio connected with my wifi, it was a snap to set up, label, customize and test all the watering zones. It's raining today and I was informed that the schedule I'd set would be on hold due to the rain. Perfect! Also nice to control and manage everything from the well-thought out phone app. Highly recommended.

I replaced an existing controller with the Rachio Gen 3 and it was very simple. Getting the old controller off took more time as I had to label the wires since they were all the same color. Once old system was down, i was up and running on the new system in minutes and I am not extremely handy. Just need to be able to use a screw driver. The app is very intuitive and properly skipped the first watering since it was raining. Features i love: cycling the watering time for slopes to avoid run off and rain, wind and freeze skips.

The Rachio line models 1 and 2 of sprinkler controllers are amazing. But the model 3 is a game changer over all other sprinkler controllers. It's customization is almost endless, and the built in weather app can detect weather and know when not to water the lawn because it's raining is just awesome. Now the Rachio 3 offers water usage monitoring with the purchase of the water flow meter, it can actually tell you how much water in gallons you are using in all your zones or any one zone in particular. As I said, it's a game changer.

I really love this system. It took me about 30 min to install and set up and now I just ignore it. It will skip watering if it rains. It will adjust days based on the temperature. I can look at my phone to see when it waters and how much it has watered this month. The zones are detailed on what is in them and what the soil is like then it tells you how much water it needs. It waters in spurts to cut down on runoff.