I had been thinking about replacing my sprinkler timer with smart technology for a few years . Totally makes sense. My 30 year-old timer must have been seeing the writing on the wall as the screen started to go out, stations started to fail and the automatic timer stopped working. For the last year before I finally got around to it, I had to manually turn on the sprinkler controller.
I decided on going with the Rachio 3 Smart Sprinkler Controller. I have 13 stations so I went with the Rachio 3 Smart 16 station Controller (there’s also a Rachio 3 8 station controller). I held off on my purchase because I was concerned that I could replace a 30-year old controller with the latest technology. Well, I found out the sprinkler technology hasn’t changed too much and the upgrade to a smart controller was a breeze.
So why upgrade your old controller to a smart controller? Here are some reasons.
- Connects to your house’s wifi and collects weather data and automatically adjusts watering frequency and duration based on your local weather. No more watering in the rain.
- Customizes watering station-by-station based on vegetation type, local soil type and exposure.
- Knows when it’s best to water (time of day), but you can adjust that based on your own preferences.
- Control the system from your phone and major Smart home platforms, including Alexa. This is very helpful when doing repairs and maintenance to your sprinklers or when you have to pause your watering for some reason.
- The app lets you know your sprinkler water usage and savings.
The toughest part of the installation was disconnecting the wires from the old controller and installing the new one. Of course, the housing box (sold separately) was a different size so required a couple of new holes in my stucco wall. And, you have to label each wire to make sure you are connecting to the correct station on the new smart controller. Most of my wires were still numbered so this wasn’t too much work. Connecting the wires was a breeze. The set up took a little time as the app goes through a series of questions for each station (vegetation type, exposure, etc) and I wanted to take a photo of each station’s watering area for future reference (which is pretty cool).
The only issue I had was that I was losing the connection to the Rachio system for the first week or two. What I figured out was that my wifi connection wasn’t the best at this particular outside location. Fortunately, I had another wifi hub that was closer that I was able to connect to. Issue solved. During that initial period, the Rachio app told me that the system was offline, but still watering. It just wasn’t able to use weather data while it was offline.
Overall, I’m very happy with the Rachio 3 Sprinkler Controller. I live in California and so far haven’t experienced the benefit of the weather data since it doesn’t rain much here until later in the year.
BUY NOW: Rachio 3 Smart Sprinkler Controller
