DominikHoffmann

I live in a suburban neighborhood. Our HOA covenant makes irrigation systems in the front yard mandatory. Previous owners upgraded to a whole-yard eight-zone irrigation system. As of the spring of 2021 I am new to smart irrigation controllers, particularly the Rachio 3.

I have a fair amount of experience with networking and other areas of IT. My home network is rather complex, comprised of a pfSense router/Internet gateway and a Velop constellation configured as Wi-Fi access points.

Don't Kill the Rachio Web App

I second that. Lately a lot of manufacturers of networking equipment have resorted to only providing access to configuration of their hardware through a dedicated smart-phone or tablet app. A lot of IoT home automation never ran an HTTP server. To me it is an unwelcome trend. The number of apps required is cumbersome.

Catching up after grass has turned yellow

Thanks! That’s the type of approach I had been looking for.

The yellow spots are most certainly caused by dryness. In Central Indiana we have very wet late winters and early springs, and then it turns very dry. The not infrequent thunderstorms do not contribute to the watering of lawns very much.

Rachio 3 220v in South Africa

In general, if you purchase equipment from outside of your country that comes with wall transformers (the kind that directly plug into the wall and produce either DC or AC low-voltage output), you first look at the input voltage parameters. If the range is something like 100–240 V AC and AC frequency.

Rachio 3 Not Responding in Homekit (Again)

Very glad to hear it. My unit has been working pretty well. It would have been sad to see HomeKit functionality fall victim to obsolescence. Hopefully, you guys can get it to be rock solid in the Rachio 4, whenever that might come. What I would like to see is a model with an Ethernet jack.

Just turned on the system for the summer yesterday. After a power-cycle on the Rachio and turning stand-by off, my Rachio has been online in the Home app. The Home app does say that there is an update for it: “An update is available for this accessory. You can install this update in the ‘Rachio’ app.”

I know this is Home app functionality, and the Rachio is responding. This could be a problem with the Home app—I did not see this with whatever iOS version I was using last summer—or a problem with how the Rachio responded to the Home app to requested information.

I have had the same thing happen to me two or three times since the watering season began here in late May. Rather than doing anything on the controller itself, I power cycled it, and that fixed the problem. Of course, that doesn’t answer the question of how this happened in the first place.

Creating & Editing Schedules

Having adjusted the soil type to “clay” and reducing the root depth gave me this schedule:

Tomorrow’s Watering Schedule

So, that’s still 17 min, only. I’ll spend some more time tweaking the parameters suggested by others.

I found this useful diagram on Wikipedia:

Here are the screenshots for my Zone 1:

How do I measure what the nozzle inches per hour really is for my sprinkler heads? Also, I wanted to point out that I had decreased the allowed depletion from 50% to 25%, in order to trigger more frequent waterings.

Zigbee uses unlicensed spectrum at 2.4 GHz, and so do Bluetooth, WiFi, some cordless phones, and microwave ovens. When we had the first 2.4 GHz cordless phone (ca. 2003) we would drop calls, when the microwave got turned on.

It is truly amazing how many people still use Apple AirPorts.

Troubleshooting

I was able to add my Rachio 3 to HomeKit for the first time today. The key was to turn off the Avahi daemon running on my pfSense box. I am dealing with a “No Response” situation now, however:

Everyone in this thread is waiting for the company to release a firmware update that will fix the issue you are having. I have yet to get mine on HomeKit in the first place.