In case you’re wondering why it’s been raining pretty much the entire last month, that’s because I reactivated my smart sprinkler controls. You’re welcome.
I have two smart valves from Rachio, and they are great. I mean, there’s not much to it: a hub and two battery-powered valves that let water flow when scheduled, when you direct via the app, or when you press the button on the valve. Standard smart home shit.
But the Rachio valves replaced Rain Point valves that were of a similar vintage, and which were fucking useless. They constantly dropped the connection to the hub, which just bricked them. That meant having to rebuild the connections from scratch every time, and rebuild the schedules thereafter.
The Rachio system had been allowed to go dormant as watering wasn’t needed over the winter. Our community does not have a sprinkler system for the common areas, so they ask us homeowners to water any grass in common areas around our homes, but only during the summer (to save on water). When the ask came around to resume watering, I reactivated the sprinklers.
The valves had been sitting outside for months with dead batteries. To reactivate them, I just changed the batteries and that was it. A few minutes later they had re-established connection to the hub and were back on schedule…literally. It seems like faint praise to laud something for working as advertised but, after the Rain Point debacle, it is notable.
One thing included for free with Rachio (that was a subscription service with Rain Point) is weather tracking. If there is enough rain predicted at your location, the system will automatically skip scheduled watering and send you a notification giving you the option to water anyway.
It works really well. So well, in fact, that the system has barely run since reactivating it because it hasn’t stopped fucking raining.
My Roborok vacuum has the dreaded “Error 44”, when the water used in the dock to clean the mop is not sucked up into the grey water tank. It just sits there festering.
The robot tells you to clean the water filter, which I do regularly and have done repeatedly to clear this error, but no joy. A quick Google told me that this is a regular occurrence with the S7 dock and there are various causes and solutions.
I have exhausted them all but one; opening up the machine and blowing through the lines. That’s a job I’m going to take on shortly.
But the mop cleaning pond in the dock has always struck me as pretty gross, and this model doesn’t dry the mop after finishing a run meaning it just sits there wet.
The Switchbot S10 is poking its head around the corner…
It’s truly heavily on the side of time saved. My Lutron light switches have been bullet proof and the Aqara ones aren’t far behind.
I have one of the blinds motors that craps out every six months or so, but that’s because it’s on a window that gets little sun to top up via the solar panel, and I forget to charge it via USB. The front doorbell continues to be cursed for some reason.
The locks have been perfect - which is the minimum standard for such things really.
I still enjoy it when automations kick in. Just hearing all the blinds open or close on schedule still makes me smile. The lounge lighting settings for TV and not TV are great; like a movie theatre when the lights come up when I turn off the TV.
Every once in a while, an update will break an automation, but they are generally easy to rebuild. Typically they can be fixed on my phone during, say, time where I’m just “sitting”.
It’s been almost three years since I started this project. It’s been basically finished for at least two years. Couldn’t be more happy that I did it.
Also it’s not pure time/cost economics. There’s entertainment value like any hobby. If you added up everything I’ve spent on my smart home stuff there’s no way I’d say it’s “worth it” for someone else to do based on dollars and cents. But if you enjoy the process, the tinkering, it’s absolutely worth it.
Update: The robot vacuum is fixed, and it was a lot easier than I had feared. I took the back off the dock, and saw immediately that the dirty water tube was completely clogged with clumping cat litter dust.
The fix was to remove the tube and squeeze out the clumps, put a swizzle stick into the respective connection nodes to clean out any shit in there and put it back together. I have never been happier to hear the gurgle of when it sucks up the dirty water out of the mop tray.
After nearly three years (not two as I said mistakenly earlier), that is by far the most maintenance I have ever had to do on it.
