Rachio Smart Sprinkler

   

The Rachio Smart sprinkler adds intelligence to the standard sprinkler controller.  Not only can you control your sprinklers from your phone or a website but the controller checks the local weather and will not water when it rains saving you money and saving the environment.  It comes in a 8 zone or 16 zone model and can be installed outside with an optional enclosure.

I purchased my Rachio last summer but only recently have I started to use it.   My Rachio was one of the first smart products that I purchased for my home.  I purchased in anticipation of using it on my lawn that I was planning to have installed but because of some higher priority projects around the house the lawn install had to wait.  I was hoping to have my lawn installed this past Spring but my landscaper talked my into waiting into fall as he had better luck with lawn installations in the fall in New England.  So after tearing up what was left of my old lawn, spreading 100 or so yards of loam and laying down the hydro seed I was ready to fire up the Rachio.

I set up the Rachio when it was installed over a year ago and I expect I will continue to tweak the settings as I go along to get the best results for my lawn.  The web and mobile app are impressive the amount of options, settings and customizations available are what make Rachio the top smart sprinkler on the market.   You can set pictures of each of your zones, there are estimates of how much water you used and saves and you get a complete watering history, that can be easily changes from your phone or the site.  Additionally, it can be integrated with other smart products like Alexa and Nest Protect Smoke detectors.  Pretty cool to be able to tell Alexa to water zone 3 for 10 minutes.

Zone Settings

With a new lawn my landscaper suggested I water my lawn a few times a day as o not let the soil get dry.  I was hoping to find a new lawn setting that would take care of this for me but it seems this functionality does not exist in the app.  So I set up 3 fixed schedules for the zones needing to be watered.  This seems to be working fine although I think having multiple schedules watering the same zones in the same day messes with the climate algorithms.  It was raining this morning so the Rachio skipped my morning watering.   But at noon I noticed my sprinklers were on.  Even though the ground was still wet, so I had to manually stop and set a rain delay so it would not water for the rest of the day.  I may post something on the Rachio community forum to see if there is something I am missing but that is my only complaint so far.

Schedule Settings

I look forward to using this in the spring as a set it and forget it app.  Overall I am very impressed with the functionality and features of the Rachio controller.  It to me is the ultimate smart  product, it is easy to use, saves you money and is good for the environment. 

Amazon Alexa and Sonos Integration

I have been anxiously awaiting the release of the Sonos / Amazon Alexa integration.  It was released this last Wednesday along with the news that Sonos is releasing their own smart speaker.

Overall the integration is pretty good, nothing mind blowing, is just works as you would expect it to.  I attempted to set it up without any instructions and failed miserably.  Usually Sonos products are extremely simple to setup but when you are dealing with integration with other products things can get complicated.  Overall setup wasn't too bad.  It only took me 10 minutes or so one I fount the instructions online.  Sonos has a great instruction video below.

First you need to add the Sonos skill in the Alexa app.  You will then be prompted to log into your Sonos and Amazon accounts and give Alexa permission to control your Sonos system.  Next you will be prompted to discover devices in the Alexa app so it can find all of your Sonos speakers,  Then you can add the music services that Sonos supports to the Alexa app.  That is pretty much it.

You need to tell Alexa which speaker your would like to control but it works as you would expect.  You can use the following commands.

Play song or artist in a particular room
Volume up / Volume down
Pause
Stop
Next track
Previous track
Add a Station on Pandora

One disappointment is that I cannot control my music library on my computer.  Hopefully this functionality is coming as right now I can only control Pandora or TunedIn as I am not an Amazon Music subscriber. It is a nice start and works fine but I hope they keep adding functionality as time goes on.

Google pulls YouTube from the Echo Show

Last week I was disappointed to find that I could no longer play YouTube videos on my Echo Show.  I asked Alexa to play a particular video and her response was that "Currently, Google is not supporting YouTube on the Echo Show".

After a little googling I found that Amazon and Google have been in negotiations for a while but Google pulled YouTube because the Echo implementation violates their terms of service and creates a broken experience, but they hope to reach an agreement and resolve the issue soon.

So each company is blaming the other and the customer loses, very unfortunate.  My guess is googles issue if that on the Echo you can't subscribe, comment, like or most importantly view and click on ads.  That is a whole revenue stream google is missing out on so that are taking their ball and leaving.

My guess is the Amazon could just serve up YouTube videos through a web browser which the Echo show must have.  Then ads and all the other functionality would be available and wouldn't violate their TOS.

For me the loss of YouTube on the Echo Show is kind of a big deal as I am not an Amazon Prime or Music Subscriber  so I have no way to listen to music on the show.  But that may be a non issue now that Sonos has released Alexa integration.  I will post about the Sonos/Alexa Integration after I have had a chance to play with it a little more.  So far though it looks pretty good.

I think as more companies get into the home automation and music streaming game there will be more and more issues like this as the companies jockey to come out on top.  Will be interesting to see how it all plays out over the next couple years.