The Rachio 3 Smart Sprinkler Controller raises the smart watering bar with foolproof installation, dual-band Wi-Fi and an expressive light bar. Rachio 3 is the only controller equipped with hyperlocal Weather Intelligence™ Plus and Rachio Wireless Flow Meter compatibility.
Available for preorder. Use coupon R3LAUNCH20 to reduce the price to $180 + free shipping for a limited time. Interesting note: Amazon recently invested in Rachio.
I wonder how the hyper local weather works without a personal weather station? The flow meter does look cool.
For you current Rachio users, are you happy with the controller?
I love my Rachio v2 controller. For the most part, the controller just works day to day like you would expect with a standard sprinkler timer. The upside features for me are
Overall, I love the device.
Cannot be happier with my Gen1. Their app is getting better and better and they respect their customers by showing love to ALL not only those with newer models. Something that not many companies do these days.
I might even upgrade to Gen3, if they fixed the annoying connection problems. This is the only complaint I have about their original controller. But reconnecting the controller to the wifi is so infrequent that it wasn’t a good reason to upgrade to Gen2, which was said to address this very problem.
Purchased the gen 3, current promo is listed on their site, but for the record it’s: MEMDAY30 takes $30 off the final price. brought it to $199.99 for me.
Installed the new 16 zone Rachio 3 last week. So far so good. I really like the ability to start and stop zones from the controller itself. Its particularly nice when someone else needs to test things (sprinkler repair guy). I’m trying the Flex Daily Schedule. It initially suggested an absurd amount of watering time. I ended up chopping it in half. I’ll see how the lawn and plants look in a couple/few weeks.
I installed a Rachio Gen 2 controller yesterday. It replaced a SkyDrop, which looked really cool and worked okay but did not talk to Smartthings. Smartthings integration was really simple and the objects were available on my Echo devices in minutes. An odd “feature” is that the objects all have the prefix "Rachio - " I found that a little obtuse in the Echo voice interface so I changed them all to "Sprinklers " plus the zone name. Sometime later either Rachio or Smartthings changed them all back! That’s a little rude!
Anyone else seen this behavior?
I installed the Rachio 3 yesterday. Very easy install. Well documented on installation steps. This was an upgrade from an analog controller. The main reason I wanted to upgrade is I do all my own work/maintenance on sprinklers. Running back and forth to “test” the system was a pain.
The software install was super easy as well. Had to run the WIFI connection twice but it connected on the 2nd try. Really like the scanning the barcode for validation/warranty. Slick. Programming zones was super easy as well. I really like being able to name the zones for easy reference in case my wife needs to do something to the system.
I have not connected to ST yet. Looked and it does not appear to support the Rachio 3 system yet. Will wait on that because I don’t want a kind of works install.
Will be interested in the future if ground sensors will also connect for watering hot spots. They will also need to come down in price.
Bottom line so far I am very pleased with this product.