We recently bought our first home, and inherited a less than stellar yard. The previous owners didn’t take great care of it, so it was now our job to bring it back to life. The good news is they already had a sprinkler system installed.
After replacing some sprinkler heads we were up an running… or so we thought. The existing system didn’t have any schedules programmed, so it was up to us to figure them out. I started researching the best times of day to water your lawn, how long it should be watered, and how many times per week. It sounded simple enough, but the more I looked into it, I realized I’d probably end up just guessing. What made it worse, was I learned that you’re supposed to adjust the schedule through the year based on how the temperature changed. Ugh.
I’m busy enough and adding one more task to my list meant that I was probably just going to forget to do it.
Even since we bought our new home, I’ve been researching all of the different smart tech you can install to make your life easier, and I actually came across the smart Rachio sprinkler system during a Google Home SXSW event.
What made the Rachio 3 Sprinkler Controller better was that it knows exactly how to water your lawn and automatically adjusts DAILY based on your actual weather, soil, grass type, and even slope of your ground. Unlike normal systems that only know it’s rained after it’s been raining, the Rachio is connected to your local weather, so it will delay watering BEFORE it even begins to rain, or if the wind is too strong.
Once you have the system connected you use the accompanying Android or IOS app to run through a questionnaire that asks for some details on each of your watering zones and you’re ready to go. You can add a picture and a name for each zone if you like too, which makes it much easier to remember which zone is located in your yard, and make it easier to control it with your Alexa or Google Home (check out the crazy amount of different Alexa commands it responds to).
Besides being able to be controlled by voice assistants, you can also connect it with a bunch of different services. If you like playing with IFTTT you can connect it with even more, so the sprinklers can do some other cool things like turn off when you walk into your backyard using motion detected by a Nest Cam.
There’s a lot of gimmicky smart tech out there that has a cool factor, but isn’t exactly going to make your life easier, and that’s not the case with the Rachio 3. It’s handles a complex issue seamlessly, makes it simple to understand, and lets you forget it’s working in the background.
I couldn’t cover ALL of the features in a single post, so if you’re like me and want to learn even more, you can check them out here.
