Rachio PROfile with Jason Powers

Jason Powers
Powers Energy Solutions
Vienna, VA
https://smart-powers.com/







Q. When was the first time you installed a Rachio?
A. Although we’ve known about Rachio for a while now, we didn’t actually install our first Iro until shortly after completing the Rachio Pro training in mid-April.

Q. What’s your favorite feature of the Rachio Iro?
A. Coming from an environmental and energy efficiency background, Rachio’s EPA WaterSense certification is what first caught my eye. Studies have shown that up to 50% of the water we use outside for irrigation is wasted so ability to conserve water and save my customers money on their water bill is huge. It’s also nice to see that state and municipal governments have realized the values in these technologies and are starting to offer rebates to install them. We work with all our customers to determine if water efficiency rebates are available in their area and then guide them through the rebate process so they can receive their rebate as quickly as possible.

Q. What do you like about Rachio?

A. That it works with Nest! My company specializes in Nest products and the many integrated ‘Works with Nest’ devices. Since we are a home automation company not an irrigation company, the ability to set up and install without the specialized skills of an irrigation technician is a big plus for us. 

Q. Do your customers like Rachio?

A. They do, and the more they learn about it the more they like it! I find that most of our customers fall into one of two camps those that have never heard of a smart sprinkler systems before and those that may have seen Rachio at one of the big box stores but didn’t really understand its value. We provide them with all the information they need to make an educated decision on whether or not to integrate Rachio into their smart home.

Q. Has Rachio changed your relationship with your customers?

A. It has, for many of the reasons stated earlier. We like being able to provide our customers with as much choice as possible when it comes to smart home products. Education is key; the IoT marketplace is rapidly changing and expanding, our customers trust that we will give them the most up to date information on all the smart home products on the market. I like to say, we don’t just install smart home devices, we help design your connected home.

Q. How long have you been in business?

A. I started my company in October of 2013. For the first year, it was just me installing smart home products in the Northern Virginia / Washington, DC area, now I have over 20 technicians in many major cities across the country. If we are not in your city yet, give us time…we soon will be!

Q. What’s your favorite aspect of landscaping or irrigation?

A. That’s a great question. As an undergrad, I majored in biology and I really like the trend toward more native species in landscaping. Native plant species require less water and provide more natural habitat and food sources for native animal species. My father is master naturalist and an apiary and he loves talking about the benefits native flower species have on bee populations. He is very proud of the Certified Wildlife Habitat sign in his front yard and I’m proud of the work we are do educating customers on the value of water conservation.

What is evapotranspiration

Evapotranspiration. If you can pronounce that, congratulations, you’ve reached another level in your irrigation life.

Evapotranspiration (ET) is a fancy way of referring to the amount of water that leaves the ground, through two methods:

1. Good old evaporation, when water turns into vapor
2. Plant transpiration, when plants ‘breath’ and release moisture into the air

In the real world, there is no good way to distinguish between evaporation and transpiration, so ET is commonly referred to as one process. Furthermore, it is just one part of the water cycle, which describes how water moves throughout our environment. This includes such fun terms as condensation, sublimation, seepage, and (my personal favorite) infiltration. However, for our purposes, we only really care about ET.

Knowing how much water leaves the ground at any point is completely vital to efficient water management for one reason: it allows us to know how much water we need to add back to the ground.

There are only two main ways that water gets returned back into the ground: precipitation and irrigation. To successfully calculate how much water needs to be returned to the ground by irrigation, you must know about precipitation, but that is relatively easy to track.

That being said, measuring ET can be a challenge. The amount of evapotranspiration fluctuates throughout the year, primarily because of temperature. ET is higher with warmer temperatures and lower with cooler temperatures. This is the main reason why the amount of water your landscape needs increases in the summer and decreases in the spring and fall.

* Image from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California

However, there are many variables that go into its calculation like soil type, plant type, temperature, direct or indirect sunlight, wind, ambient humidity, etc. Accurate data for all of these variables is imperative to calculate the most correct ET value. Without ET, it’s impossible to correctly calculate how much water your landscape requires.

If you’d like to understand how Rachio incorporates evapotranspiration, check out this excellent support article.

Water Stories: Matt Beazer

Matt Beazer
Spokane Valley, WA
Rachio user for 3 months



Q. What led you to purchase your Rachio Iro?
A. I bought my home in early fall of 2014. It had been unoccupied for 8 years. In the spring I found myself faced with fixing most of a decade of deferred sprinkler maintenance. The sprinkler controller is in my basement, so doing sprinkler testing had me running across the house and down two flights of stairs every time I wanted to test a new sprinkler head or purge a line of dirt. The Rachio has saved me literally hundreds of trips up and down the stairs in the last few months.

Q: How has the Iro changed your lawn/ landscape?
A. I was guessing with my sprinkler watering times before, leading to browning of grass in some zones and overwatering in others. The Rachio gave me a baseline that kept the lawn green in the brown areas and avoided runoff into the street in others.

Q: Where is the best place you have controlled your Iro from?
A. The best place I've used it is from work while watching my security cameras over the Internet. The neighbors across the street think my front lawn is their own personal dog toilet. I installed security cameras to catch them at it but the neighbors didn't care and sent their dogs over to "do their business" anyhow. Now when I see the dogs in my yard I use the Rachio app to turn the sprinklers on remotely, resulting in the dogs making a fast exit from my yard and returning to their owners soaking wet. Needless to say I've stepped in a lot less dog poo while mowing my lawn since installing the Iro!

Q: What is your favorite feature of the Rachio app or webapp?
A. Being able to turn on specific zones anywhere in the world I have Internet access at any time for any reason.

Q: How has owning an Iro enhanced your understanding of your water use?
A. People don't realize how many gallons of water it takes to keep your yard green. I own a third of an acre and it takes vastly more water than I realized to water it until I got the Iro.

Q: Do you have any other stories about the Rachio Iro you'd like to share?
A. When it's hot outside and my kids want to play in the sprinklers, I just pull out my phone and turn the sprinklers on and relax on the patio while they play. Then when they get cold or tired I don't have to worry about the kids forgetting to turn the water off and flooding the yard.

Rachio PROfile with Michael Greathouse

Michael Greathouse
GreatWater Irrigation and Ecoscapes
Fort Worth, TX
http://www.greatwaterirrigation.com/



Q. When was the first time you installed a Rachio?
A. April this year (2015), about a week after it was introduced to me through our supplier, Ewing.

Q. What’s your favorite feature of the Rachio Iro?
A. The weather intelligence and water budgeting features. North Texas has some very unpredictable weather and this year has definitely been extreme. This controller can help my clients stay ahead of their water needs as our climate has taken us from a serious drought to tropical storm levels of rain.

Q. What do you like about Rachio?
A. I love that its core function is to help people save water in a very easy, automated way. Our business is centered around helping people water smarter. Being able to give irrigation systems a smart controller allows them to start saving water immediately while knowing their yard is still getting all the water it needs.

Q. Do your customers like Rachio?
A. Almost everyone I've introduced to the Iro is very interested in the product and think it's something that really just makes sense. Every controller I've installed has been met with novel excitement and enthusiasm. Once a customer starts getting the notifications showing that their system is now interacting with the world around it, they really start to understand and trust that it's making a significantly positive impact on their water usage.

Q. Has Rachio changed your relationship with your customers?
A. Talking to my customers about the different smart features of the Iro controller has helped bring their attention and interest to other smart components that are available such as flow sensors, soil sensors and rain/freeze sensors. We've noticed that when our customers gain the ability to control their irrigation system using the same device they use for the rest of daily life, they feel more empowered to manage it effectively since it's easier to use.

Q. How long have you been in business?
A. My company was founded in May 2014 after having worked in the industry for over 15 years.

Q. What’s your favorite aspect of landscaping or irrigation?
A. I love being able to help solve people’s problems with their landscaping and irrigation systems. Whether they've never used a sprinkler system, or they've been treated unfairly in the past, I like leaving the property owner feeling like they understand their irrigation systems better than they ever have before. We're also really proud of the fact that we're offering products and services that don't just make peoples landscapes look better, but that actually have a tangibly positive effect on our local environment by significantly reducing their landscape water and chemical treatment usage.

Avoid Water Runoff With Cycle and Soak

Have you ever seen water dribbling off a lawn onto the pavement or into a gutter? The sprinklers are likely still running, but the yard isn’t absorbing the water anymore. It’s frustrating, right? All that water being used, but it’s not going where it’s supposed to: the yard. This is called runoff, and it's a waste of water.

How do you avoid water runoff?

The best way to avoid runoff* is with a technique called cycle and soak!

Cycle and soak is a technique developed to avoid water runoff, making your water use more efficient, and making sure your yard gets the moisture it needs. The basic idea is to break up your irrigation into two or three parts in order to allow the dirt to better absorb the water. This has a few key benefits:

• It allows your grass or plants to properly absorb the water.
• It promotes root depth, which makes your yard more drought and disease resistant.

Using the same metaphor that we used in our MAD article, imagine that your yard is a dense sponge. When you pour water onto a sponge, it takes time for the water to work its way through the entire sponge. And you need the water to get through the entire sponge, because you want all of your roots to have water!

By breaking up an irrigation session into shorter parts, this lets the water work its way through the entire sponge, making room for the second or third cycle of water to follow. It also allows the water to get deeper into the soil.

How do you calculate how long each cycle should take?

The short answer is that you need to know the density of your sponge, and that depends primarily on what type of dirt you have. For example, sandy soil absorbs water very quickly, but clay soil does not, and there is a wide range of soil in between. An irrigation professional can easily tell you what type of soil you have, and it’s great to know on a zone by zone basis. Most professionals would be happy to do an audit of your landscape in order to determine this info, and make sure the rest of your irrigation system is optimized.

Your soil type, plus the type of plant being watered, plus a few other factors, determines how long the irrigation session should last. For example, one zone might need 45 minutes in one session. With cycle and soak, this would get broken into 2 or 3 different sessions, perhaps 15 minutes of watering followed by a 30 minute rest, then another 15 minutes of watering, then another 30 minute rest, then the final 15 minutes of watering. This allows the water to truly soak the landscape, without runoff.

If you would like to know how Rachio incorporates Cycle and Soak, and all the variables that come into play, please check out our support article on Smart Cycle.

* Assuming that your sprinkler heads are pointed where they are supposed to!

Water Stories: Barry Jordan

Barry Jordan
August, GA
Rachio user for 3 months




Q. What led you to purchase your Rachio Iro?
A. I wanted to save resources and have a beautiful lawn. I was just guessing before. Now I feel like I'm getting personal advice from a professional landscaper.

Q. How has the Iro changed your lawn/ landscape?
A. I've seen areas of stress on my lawn "green up." But more importantly, Rachio is always working for me. I don't have to think about whether or not I should or should not adjust my sprinkler system every few months, only to find that after I increased it, it rained 3 times in a week! Rachio is always watching out for my lawn.

Q. Where is the best place you have controlled your Iro from?
A. Work. We had some landscaping done and needed some sprinkler heads added to our system, so we had a guy come to the house. Since my wife and I were both gone that day, we didn't feel like leaving the garage door open for him (and anyone else) to wander in. He called me at work to let me know he was done and he would "just have to come back tomorrow and turn the system on to check it." I let him know I could do that for him now. Since I work on a computer and have Rachio saved as a favorite site, I was able to open the page the minute he called. He was amazed at how I was able to instantly turn on the zone he needed. It only took 2 minutes to ensure everything was correct! (He had a lot of questions about the Iro, which I was happy to answer for him.)

Q. What is your favorite feature of the Rachio app or webapp?
A. The analytic reports. I love seeing how many gallons of water I'm saving just by having the Rachio (almost 4000 gallons this month alone).

Q. How has owning an Iro enhanced your understanding of your water use?
A. I feel I've learned a lot about my yard. I never had the interest or saw the need to do a simple soil test, for example, and was surprised to find that my soil was the exact opposite type that I thought it was. This only cost me a few minutes of my time and was well worth it.

If you would like to be featured on rachio.com for your water story, we'd love to hear from you. Just fill out this survey, and we'll be in touch!

Thanks to Barry for being our inaugural water story!

Rachio's One Year Anniversary

Today, Rachio celebrated the 1 year anniversary of the Rachio Iro being available.

To everyone who has used Rachio, worked with us, or helped us along the way, thank you.

Rachio started at a Denver Startup Weekend event over two years ago with the goal of solving the problem when sprinklers are watering just before, during, or after it's rained. To date, Rachio has helped homeowners save over 150 million gallons of water, a number that continues to grow rapidly. While we started with that simple idea, Rachio has evolved and grown into a leader in the Internet of Things space, with top ratings across all of our sales channels and a passionate and dedicated community.

We knew the Iro would be one way to ease drought issues and we’re so glad that consumers are using the Iro to keep their landscape beautiful but to also conserve our world’s most precious resource.

This special anniversary coincides with two other events: the release of our 2.0 version of the Rachio app, and Smart Irrigation Month, which promotes the efficient use of water.

We published a press release commemorating the event.

Thank you!