60 Days with Iro

We installed our first hand-assembled Iro at my house in early May and I thought I’d share what we’ve learned over the last 60 days.

Water was Saved

Yes, Iro does help save a lot of water! I've been pretty conservative when it comes to watering my landscape over the past few years, so I'll admit I was quite surprised when I looked at my usage numbers year-over-year.

I saw a huge 8,000 gallon savings in May and another 6,000 gallons saved in June. Here in Denver that saved me a little over $50 in that two month span.

Accessibility is Empowering

A big reason for the major water savings is due to the accessibility of scheduling and system tweaking all from the palm of my hand.

Spring Maintenance

It was easy to perform an early spring tuneup because I was no longer running back and forth to the irrigation controller to turn zones on and off. I found it way easier to inspect and tweak nozzles because I could simply turn them on and off with my phone. It's funny how something that simple is so empowering.

"...a lot of times it's actually good to water when it rains."

Weather

We're in the learning stage of our smart scheduling algorithm, so we've been doing a lot of manual adjusting of watering schedules. I found myself watching weather patterns specific to my neighborhood and adjusting my schedule accordingly. Here's something really interesting we learned: a lot of times it's actually good to water when it rains. Let me clarify.

Here in Denver we often get a quick sprinkle or torrential downpour that lasts for just a few minutes. Because of our clay soils, most of the time very little of this rain water is absorbed by our landscape. Good watering practice here in Denver is to cycle soak. That is, if you're going to water a zone for 15 minutes, break those 15 minutes up into three separate 5 minute cycles.

So, taking this into account, we found that treating our quick rains as one of those 5 minute cycles and then watering shortly after proved to be productive. We were able to take advantage of the rain loosening the soil up and cut our water usage for that given watering day by a third.

Zone Specifics

I started really paying attention to zone specifics like shade and soil type. I realized just how much those two attributes of a zone can drastically impact the amount of water you'll want to use. We talked about what clay soil means for us and the benefit to cycle soak above. Shade is also huge.

I found that certain zones in my landscape have a good amount of shade and can go 10 days or so without watering and still be healthy. We validated that all zones shouldn't be treated the same and that if we have a way to easily adjust for zone specifics, we can still have really healthy landscapes while using a lot less water.

So there you have it, 60 days with Iro and 14,000 gallons saved, a finely tuned system and a new engagement with my landscape that has made this spring enlightening and a lot of fun.

Security and the Internet of Things

With the proliferation of internet connected devices in your house security is one thing that should not be taken lightly. There are some basic questions that need to be asked of any company which provides home automation products that access your wireless network to communicate with external systems.

- What transport protocol is used for device communication?

- What authentication scheme is used for device control and communication?

- Can someone access my personal information being sent to and from my device?

Industry Standards

At rachio we take security very seriously. That's why we have spent an incredible amount of time using industry standards to make sure that there is no malicious use of our products.

Transport Protocol

HTTPS (Hypertext Transport Protocol Secure) is used for all machine-to-machine (M2M) communication from the devices in your house to our secured cloud server. HTTPS has been designed to provide an enhanced security layer when sending sensitive data, compared to the unsecured HTTP protocol. HTTPS encrypts every data packet using the SSL encryption technique to avoid anyone trying to extract the content of the data.

Authentication and Secure API Design

All of our devices and cloud server are built around using a RESTful, stateless design. In order to secure our RESTful services, a hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) is used to sign the device and cloud communication requests with a secret key.  So what does this mean?

Well, instead of having to send your username and password across the wire, your Iro and our cloud each have a secret key which is used to generate the HMAC.

When our cloud service receives communication from your Iro, it accesses your secret key and uses it to create an HMAC for the incoming communication. The cloud server then verifies that the submitted HMAC request matches the one sent by your Iro and if the two hashes match, your're authenticated.

There are some distinct advantages with using this authentication scheme. By using an HMAC passwords are never sent in the request. Also, if a hacker is able to modify the request in transit, the signatures would not match and the message would fail authentication.

Top of Our List

At rachio, security is at the top of our list. Hopefully this discussion has allowed you to understand some of the measures put into place for the protection of your Iro and data.