Rachio 2.0 Is Out

We are very excited to announce that version 2.0 of the Rachio app on both iOS and Android are released. Go get them!

The team has been working on the features, upgrades, and visual changes in the app for a long time, and we cannot wait for you to try it out.

There are a few features in particular that we would like to highlight:

Flex Schedules

With Flex Schedules, Rachio Iro uses the latest in academic, peer-reviewed irrigation research to create and dynamically update the perfect irrigation schedule you. Flex uses an irrigation technique called Management Allowable Depletion (MAD) that can even further reduce your water usage while promoting a healthy and drought resistant landscape. Flex waters your lawn less frequently but more deeply, encouraging plants to build stronger root structures.

Rachio incorporates this new technique and combines it with all the smart weather information you are already familiar with.

For more info, check out our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) article on Flex.

New Activity Feed

The new awesome activity screen is a single place where you can quickly see all the events related to your irrigation system.

For more info, check out this article on the new activity feed.

Preferred Weather Stations

Choose any local or personal weather station to ensure your Iro has the most accurate weather data available. The app has a quick, visual, and easy way to see where your weather station is relative to your Iro.

For more info, check out this article on picking a weather station.

New Dashboard

The new dashboard puts everything you need to know in one place. Monitor your Rachio Iro's status, schedule changes, watering zones, and more.

For more info, check out this article on the new dashboard.

Know Your Yard

Easily see past, present, and future watering and even choose a photo for each zone.

For further info, check out our support article on keeping track of your yard.

Remote

Start watering in all or any specific at a touch of a button.

For more info, see this article on the new remote feature.

If you have any questions about these new features, you can always reach us on our support site.

Enjoy!

We're MAD For Irrigation

MAD. It’s all the rage.

But, what is MAD? I’m glad you asked.

MAD is an acronym for Management Allowable Depletion, the best and most recommended way to schedule your irrigation. But what is it?

To explain, let me use an analogy. Imagine your soil is a sponge, and imagine that sponge is as full of water as possible. As the grass or plants absorbs water from the sponge, or as it evaporates into the air, the amount of water in the sponge becomes less.

With an older style of irrigation, water would be added to the sponge on a fixed, regular schedule, regardless of how much water has been removed. For example, the sponge would have water added every three days for 30 minutes each day. This could result in over-watering, because the sponge is already full, or under-watering, because the sponge became completely dry before a fill up.

With MAD, the goal is to add water to the sponge when it reaches a certain amount of dryness, but before it is completely dry. This has a few key benefits:

• It encourages plants to develop deeper root structures, which creates stronger, healthier plants that are more resistant to drought.
• It requires less frequent waterings, because each watering is for a longer period of time with the goal of deeper watering. The overall effect is less water used.
• It allows less water to be lost to evaporation, because the water is deeper into the ground.

It is called Management Allowable Depletion because this irrigation schedule allows the amount of water to deplete to a fixed level before refill.

Compared to a fixed schedule, MAD would fill up the sponge only when required, which could be every two days, or five days, or even longer!

There are two key factors that need to be calculated for MAD style of irrigation: how big the sponge is, and how much water is in the sponge at any one time. To get to those two elements, there are quite a few data points that go into this:

• The type of plant
• The type of soil
• The amount of precipitation
• The amount of water the plant absorbs
• The amount of water that evaporates

The challenge in calculating MAD is ensuring that the inputs are correct, particularly because they are ongoing inputs. However, once you have these inputs, you can create an irrigation schedule that is tailor made for your soil and plants, while saving a large amount of water.

Whenever you install or update your irrigation system, this is a great opportunity to make sure that you know what type of soil you have, and what types of plants are in each zone. This will allow you to be as accurate as possible when creating your watering schedule.

If you’d like to know how Rachio incorporates MAD, please check out our support articles on Flex Schedules.

Happy 4th of July From Rachio

Since the beginning, Rachio has been designed and made in Colorado. It's something we're very proud of.

We have great partners that are located in the US, including manufacturing in Colorado and engineering design in Pennsylvania.

Using local manufacturing services just makes good business sense. As a small company, we rely on our ability to be nimble and agile. We make quick decisions, and being located close to our partners allows us follow through on those decisions.

In addition, whenever issues pop up our close proximity to our manufacturing teams allows us to react extremely quickly, before they become larger issues. Our main production facility is an hour away, and it's a huge benefit for us to be able to check in and see the process from start to finish.

On this Independence Day, we feel very lucky to be able to say that we continue to be designed and built in the United States. Have a wonderful and safe holiday weekend.

July Is Smart Irrigation Month

Welcome to Smart Irrigation month!

What is Smart Irrigation month you may ask?

July is the peak demand month of the year for water, so the Irrigation Association created Smart Irrigation month to raise awareness of water use in the United States. They strive to educate everyone on how we might better use one of our most precious natural resources.

Founded in 2005, the month has steadily gained traction, particularly as parts of the country have experienced their own form of drought.

According to the IA, the month is focused on the 3 following principles:

• Educate businesses, homeowners, growers/producers and other users about efficient water use.
• Encourage industry firms and professionals to promote smart irrigation practices and technologies.
• Position your organization as a leader in smart water stewardship.

At Rachio, we fully embrace Smart Irrigation and the idea that everyone can do something to make their water use more efficient. It’s what drives us as a company, and we have the EPA credentials to prove it.

Throughout July, we’re going to start a few initiatives within the company.

1. First, we’re going to start an educational blog series about the best practices related to maintaining your landscape. 
2. Second, we’re going to highlight some of the trailblazing homeowners who are using Rachio to increase control over their irrigation practices, saving water and money in the process. 
3. Third, we’re going to highlight some of the fantastic irrigation professionals who are helping homeowners install Rachio Iros and keep their landscapes at peak efficiency.

Finally, we’d love to engage with you about your smart irrigation practices. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or whatever social tool you prefer!

Building Hardware Through A Software Lens

The connected device world is an interesting space. We spend a lot of our time trying to figure out how all of the pieces come together, or what makes a good IoT product in general. For us, it always comes down to the software. After all, that’s the promise of a connected world. That’s what you’re paying for: the scalable, intelligent features that come with software. And it’s a beautiful thing when you start to think about devices and household appliances from a pure software perspective.

When you think of it as software enabled by hardware, you start to push the boundaries of what you thought was possible and think about physical products in a much different light. You think about things like “how do we not constrain our software by our hardware?”, which is a very interesting thought process.

Rachio thinks this way.

We are watching a number of trends taking shape because of the transformative power of software on our physical world and we try to interpret what those trends mean for and how they tie into a connected device company. We thought it would be great to share our learnings in a few blog posts, starting with this one, the obvious one.

Start by building a 10x better mousetrap.

Eighty six percent of our customers replace what most of the world deems to be a working product: an irrigation controller that is neither connected nor intelligent but still runs the sprinkler system. If we’re going to continue to replace “working” products, we’re going to need to create something that is ten times better than what’s being recycled.

The key here is to do it with software.  Companies have been making irrigation controllers for decades. There’s most likely not going to be a lot of innovation on the hardware outside of connectivity. Instead, the 10x improvement needs to come from software features. This is probably fairly obvious, but as we go through these trends, you’ll notice how this has a profound difference on the end product.

At Rachio, we believe the product must do something intelligent. It must do something you, the homeowner, couldn’t have done without great pain in the past. Installation of a physical product is just the start. We design and build features that make your ongoing relationship with the product a wonderful experience. We strive to make you feel empowered by the system and brought into the decision making process when you’re ready and willing. Since your ongoing engagement is going to be through the software, that’s where we focus our energy.

Here are just a number of high level benefits that come with a connected device over a non-connected device:

• Convenience: the ability to control and interact with the product from anywhere, on any device.
• Pain Relief: real-time smart scheduling that makes efficient use of a resource, which was painful to do manually in the past. Or a cycling technology, like our smart cycle, that more efficiently distributes the resource. 
• Empowerment: usage information at your fingertips about a valuable resource like water or energy, at the single product and community level. 
• Shared Access: a sharing feature that makes a subset of product functionality available to family members or service providers, on-site or remotely.
• Timely Information: notifications that get you information that you deem important in notification systems you’ve become accustomed to.
• Bundling: combinations of data feeds, like how a weather feed can now affect your landscape.
• Delighters: the small things that were essentially impossible before, but can easily be done with software now.  An example for us is our water hammer feature that keeps your pipes from banging in the middle of the night when your irrigation system is switching zones. 

This is just the short list and these types of benefits can really only be achieved with software, and they make these products very different from their non-connected predecessors. The really exciting thing is that these features can also be expanded on and continuously updated for our customers as we learn what they value most.

Next up, Getting Connected - what a public API can mean for a connected device company.

We’re looking forward to continuing to share as we learn.

Rachio is now integrated with Crestron

Rachio is thrilled to announce that we are now integrated with Crestron, one of the leading providers of control and automation systems. Use the new Rachio driver from Crestron to utilize Crestron’s personalization settings and get more engaged with your landscape.

To see all the 3rd party products that Rachio works with, please see our integrations page.

Colorado Parks

As Summer draws near, Coloradans are packing away their coats and snow gear in exchange for shorts, hiking boots and the occasional set of flip flops. While many are reluctant to give up their skis, the warmer seasons are welcomed by those who are appreciative of what our mountains have to offer without snow: kayaking, rock climbing, world-class hiking, and more!

May is considered the wettest month in Colorado, and it's lived up to its name in the last week or so. Across the state, we've experienced day after day of rain, sleet and snow, depending on elevation. While this dampened the mood of those who were hoping to spend Mother's Day outdoors, this weather was of tremendous benefit to the health of our ecosystems, many of which are deprived of water.

Realizing that it was a little too early in the season to hike one of our famous 14,000' peaks, I set out early on Saturday morning to one of my favorite places, Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP), to see the effect of our recent weather on the landscape.

I was not disappointed. Despite the rain -- and later, snow -- I could not have chosen a better day. There were very few people in the park as a result of the weather, and the areas I passed on the way up that were not covered by snow were vibrant, green, and healthy as a result of the moisture.

I set out at the Glacier Gorge Trailhead, with the intent of reaching Mills Lake, named after Enos Mills who lobbied for the creation of the park in the early 20th century. Altogether, the hike would total a relatively short 5 miles.

On my way up, I passed Alberta Falls. Even though I had taken the same route many times before, never had I seen so much water running through them.

By the time I had reached Mills Lake, I was approximately 10,000' above sea-level, and surrounded by three majestic, albeit obscured peaks: Pagoda, Chief's Head, and Thatchtop. Unfortunately, the fog was such that these are virtually impossible to see in the photos below!

RMNP is a special place for anyone interested in hydrology or water, in general. With the Continental Divide running the length of the park, precipitation in the park is split between the Colorado River and Mississippi drainage. The water in Mills, which is East of the Divide, runs into the latter.

If you make it out to Colorado this Summer, I'd strongly recommend you pay a visit to one of our many great alpine lakes. With a warm week ahead, I, as well as a few of my teammates at Rachio, are excited to get outside and see the effect that our recent precipitation has had on these lakes and the ecosystems that they are a part of.