After Bidets, this item is the second best woot off all time.
Everytime these are offered I sing its praises. If you are using a hunter sprinkler controller, you will enjoy smashing it “office space style” 10 minutes after you install a rachio.
This does everything your current controller does, but it’s 100x easier. fully programmable, obviously, but also very smart in weather adjustment.
The best feature is you can control any and all zones from your pocket. walking across the lawn and think one zone needs more water? you can do a quick-run, then change that zones programming in seconds. 45 Turkeys in your yard? you can chase them away with irrigation(yes, I do).
most time saving, most frustration-relieving woot ever.
One of the best Woot purchases I’ve made. I bought the 8-zone model a couple of years ago…very easy to install and program.
I purchased the gen 1 16 zone system from woot WAY WAY back. Though I didn’t share “schorerts” smashing plan, I hung on to my Rainbird for the season, just in case. It was easy to hook up. Simple connection to the home wifi (after some changes). And it works great. Water savings amount(s) is debatable but it does help you cut down on un-needed watering. The one thing that takes the longest to set up is each zone, you can adjust the type of soil, slop, sun/shade mix, even if it’s bushes or grass or your neighbors patio (or at least within firing range).
Just a couple of suggestions.
- Before you set it up, as with all our IOT devices, if you can, set up a separate network/SSID connection. I made one called of all things, IOT and isolated it from my home network (for obvious reasons).
- Put it to sleep/standby for the season. Here in Michigan, you only need to use it for a couple months till the first time everything ices over.
What I like about this version is the manual on/off buttons. Normally at the beginning of the season you might need to use those buttons or when you put it t sleep and want to clear your lines but with gen 1, you have to use your phone. And if it just so happen to have been kicked off the network at some point, you gotta do a little network trouble shooting to get it back online. But like everyone else said, this is one of the better deals I’ve gotten from Woot. $99 bucks would be a better price IMO but it is what it is.
I bought an 8 zone Gen 2 to replace an existing dumb sprinkler controller in the house I just bought. Installation was pretty reasonable (harder to get rid of the old crap than to install this). Love the options for watering different areas, automatic season adjustments, checking if a sprinkler is broken or not without having to run back and forth to the garage, etc.
The only problem I had was with trying to setup the controller through my old locked down Wifi network router. Couldn’t get it to work until I connected it through a more open guest Wifi and after that, it’s worked like a charm.
The open box version of this is selling at $109 if anyone is interested.
Bonus points for Office Space reference.