News By Lee Mathews May. 13, 2014 4:43 pm
Your connected home might already have IP cameras, app-controlled*LED bulbs, and a Nest running your air conditioning and heating. But what’s it using to water your lawn? Probably not something as smart as Rachio’s Iro.
For a lot of us, it’s still a manual process: hook up the hose, drag out the sprinkler, and turn it on. If you’ve got an irrigation system, you’ve probably got a timer that takes care of watering on a schedule… but they’re fairly dumb. In fact, most will water regardless of current conditions and even come on during a downpour.
Iro aims to change all that. It’s an intelligent, connected controller that is to irrigation what the Nest is to heating and cooling. And, like Nest, it’s designed to be a simple plug-and-play upgrade (for a good number of systems, at any rate).
Connecting Iro to the net is about as easy as it gets. Once you’ve installed the app on your phone and powered on the controller, you just need to hold your phone against the base unit for a few seconds. It immediately queries Rachio’s cloud and uses your location data to pull down environmental data (including local soil types) to create a preliminary schedule. Rachio also tries to keep tabs on local restrictions to make sure your sprinklers remain compliant.
Iro doesn’t stop there, either. Using the smartphone app you can set up different zones in your yard and specify what you’ve got planted in them. A cactus garden has vastly different needs than a bed full of petunias, after all, and can customized watering schedules for zoned sprinkler systems to suit your needs.
So how much water can Iro save? One of Rachio’s beta testers set the system up in his Colorado yard and ran it for 60 days. Iro helped him use around 14,000 gallons less during May and June of 2013 over the same period in 2012. The $50 he saved on water paid for 20% of the Iro in just two months. Not too shabby.
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For a lot of us, it’s still a manual process: hook up the hose, drag out the sprinkler, and turn it on. If you’ve got an irrigation system, you’ve probably got a timer that takes care of watering on a schedule… but they’re fairly dumb. In fact, most will water regardless of current conditions and even come on during a downpour.
Iro aims to change all that. It’s an intelligent, connected controller that is to irrigation what the Nest is to heating and cooling. And, like Nest, it’s designed to be a simple plug-and-play upgrade (for a good number of systems, at any rate).
Connecting Iro to the net is about as easy as it gets. Once you’ve installed the app on your phone and powered on the controller, you just need to hold your phone against the base unit for a few seconds. It immediately queries Rachio’s cloud and uses your location data to pull down environmental data (including local soil types) to create a preliminary schedule. Rachio also tries to keep tabs on local restrictions to make sure your sprinklers remain compliant.
Iro doesn’t stop there, either. Using the smartphone app you can set up different zones in your yard and specify what you’ve got planted in them. A cactus garden has vastly different needs than a bed full of petunias, after all, and can customized watering schedules for zoned sprinkler systems to suit your needs.
So how much water can Iro save? One of Rachio’s beta testers set the system up in his Colorado yard and ran it for 60 days. Iro helped him use around 14,000 gallons less during May and June of 2013 over the same period in 2012. The $50 he saved on water paid for 20% of the Iro in just two months. Not too shabby.
More...
