I just pulled the trigger on one today, and will be installing it tonight.
I really wish it also had a manual interface at the controller, but I'm sure I'll adapt.
16 zones without an expansion pack is a plus too! Should be an easy setup!
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I'll start my review by saying I ordered this off Amazon Prime and got free same day shipping. That's right. I ordered it late morning and they delivered it at 2045 hrs.
Now if only I were in the Prime Now zone!I irrigate 60,000+ sf of cool season turf via a 14 zone system that runs off a Grundfos well pump.
I installed it tonight. I'm pretty handy with electrical work and technology in general. It took me about 45 minutes to get the unit wired up on the wall. Mostly because I took extra time to tape each wire with the number of the zone rather than rely on color alone. With 14 zones too many colors are similar. It took another half hour to get an account created and the application installed on my Android device.
The unit is definitely not designed for manual use at the unit like it's predecessor was. The plastic is not heavy duty. The wire connections are not screwed down and as tight more traditional controllers are. The bag of hardware was missing one of the screws for the wall anchors. I improvised with a drywall screw that doesn't match which was mildly dissappointing.
The unit was about 40 ft from my dual band router but had no problems connecting and staying connected to my wifi. Great reception. My cell phone wifi was getting intermittent wifi connectivity in the same spot.
Setting up each zone and testing took another 45 minutes. I didn't make any wiring mistakes but the software would take some time to reconnect to the unit when my wifi and cell signal would switch back and fOrth as i wandrew in amd out of wifive range. So I had to run the tests a few times on certain zones.
Sign up for an account was easy and painless.
Integration with my smart home is amazing. I can water the grass by voice alone. Rachio doesn't support natively running a schedule program via Amazon Alexa which is disappointing. To work around this I built an IFTTT trigger to run certain programs. Now I can say "Alexa trigger syringing the grass" or "Alexa trigger watering my urea in" and I don't have to find my phone or run out to the console. Hell I can turn on the sprinklers with my voice from the back porch while smoking a bowl of aged Virginia in my briar pipe while sipping a 12 year just to watch them. it's glorious.
I created a custom nozzle with the manufacturer specs for my nozzles, entered the soil type, and as accurate config data as I could to see how the smart schedule would compare with what I know to be reality. I've measured with sprinkler system water gages and have most zones pretty accurate at this point. The Rachio did a decent job of calculating zones relevant to one another but frankly my manual testing was more fine tuned. I would still recommend the ol tuna can method to calculate times per zone. Their software doesn't account for partial rotor angles etc.
Wink integration is ok but not great. I can't create a shortcut to run a zone or program a robot to use it. It would be nice to have a shortcut I can hit on thw wink relay in my office so I could kick off a program when I'm on a conference call or don't want to wake someone with a voice command when my phone is docked on a speaker device.
It would also be nice to have my syringe program kick off between say 3 and 4 when temps exceed a certain threshold.
I'll review more later but the Smart Home integration, set up time, and app are great so far. the materials are a bit flimsy but that's OK since they don't really want you to use the controller to manually turn knobs nor do I.
The voice control via Amazon Alexa is really really cool.
Previous rainbird controller that had stronger plastic and screw tightened wire connections
Bag missing a screw
I highly recommend folding a piece of tape over each wire with the zone number on it before disconnecting.
All wired up and functional.
