UPDATE JULY 2016: I finally got my first water bill containing the use of this timer for an entire month. According to wunderground's historical data, June 2016 was very much like June 2015. Average temp was 86.3 vs. 2015's 85.2. Mean temperature was 59.6 vs. 60.5. Precipitation was 0.64" in 2016 vs. 0.58 in 2015. The water bill didn't show gallons I used last year, but according to the graph they give me it looks like somewhere between 20% and 30% less water used this year. My grass is no more dead than usual. The past couple weeks we've been in the mid to high 90s in temperature, and the sprinklers have come on every evening, so I was a little concerned, but let it do its thing. In the end, it is watering for a much shorter time each evening, and just watering more often than my manually scheduled timer was before. If this thing continues to save 20%-30% of my water bill it will be paid for before the end of summer. ORIGINAL REVIEW: Before you begin reading the wall of text, know that I received this product free in exchange for an honest review. I upgraded from an old orbit timer that had been working flawlessly for 10 years, to this wifi enabled timer. I took a picture of the old wiring and was able to get this installed in about 15 minutes. As Lego Batman would say, "First Try!" It's much bulkier than my old timer, but includes a lock so I could mount it outside in the weather or something if I wanted to. I didn't want to. It's still a little early in the watering season for me, so I'm not sure I've run it through all its paces, but I've had it wired up for a week now. Before I hooked it up I figured I should fix the one broken sprinkler I knew about so I could test the lines. That was backward. With the old timer you obviously had to be at the timer in order to manually start and stop a station. So in flushing the line and validating my fix I had to run back and forth into the garage to start the water, then out to look at the line and check for leaks. I'm sure the neighbors enjoyed hearing me yelling from the front into the garage to my young son, "Push it now!" and having nothing happen because he couldn't reach the button... I tell you that story so that you know that had I replaced the timer first, I could have stood over the sprinkler and just tapped a button on my phone to start and stop the zone. I have 6 stations attached to the 12 station timer, and already I can tell I'm going to wish I had finer grained control of my irrigation. I inherited it when I bought the house 15 years ago and have had to discover all the secrets as things break over the years. In the companion app it was very nice to be able to name the stations I have setup. I could walk around the yard, start them, shut them down, and try to pick a meaningful name by what they were shooting at. For each station I had to select the soil type, head count, head type, etc. It would have been very nice if I could set defaults for the soil type and head type as most of my lines are essentially the same, but instead I had to select each part for each line. Not a huge inconvenience, especially since I'll really only have to do it once, but annoying enough I thought I would mention it. I originally setup my stations to run like I had on my old timer. Each one ran for the same amount of time and that was it. After poking around in the app for a bit, I thought the watering budget was very awesome. I could keep my program with X minutes per stations, but depending on the weather I could give it a percentage of that program. With it being early spring, and the weather having been cool I figured I would set it to 40% of my regular summer program. I think this feature is awesome. I could then adjust as things warmed up. I think you can even go above 100% if you are having a long dry spell or something. After playing with that, I went to the "smart watering" feature. This would be much more valuable if I took the time and energy to do something with the capture cups or whatever they're called, but I haven't done that. I'm hoping the app is smart enough to figure out something decent given the shade stats I gave it for each station and be "close enough." Smart watering allows the timer to take control of your water schedule. I like to water at night so stuff doesn't just evaporate. With smart watering I can direct it to only do it's watering thing between hours I choose. So far, that seems to be working. Smart watering also allows the timer to do automatic rain delays. We had a very wet weekend and it was nice to see the timer adjusting its next start time automatically each night. It is also supposed to take the temperature into account. One other nice feature of the smart watering is I can decide which zones participate. I can have a program that only includes garden lines and use smart watering for my lawn lines, or whatever. This was fortunate for me since while testing I found water coming up through my concrete and I haven't had time to fix that yet, so I was able to just opt that zone out of the smart watering. The app even alerts me that zone 4 is not included in any watering schedule. A nice feature. Finally, I read other reviews with concerns about wifi connectivity. I was a little concerned about this as my wireless router is upstairs in my bedroom so the signal has to go through an inside wall, a floor, and an outside wall to get to the timer in the garage. My phone showed OK, but not great signal strength at the location where I wanted to mount it. I'm happy to say I haven't seen any problems with it at all. I would also point out that your phone does NOT have to be on the same network as the timer. Once your timer is connected to the internet you can control it with the app from anywhere that you can get an internet connection. I have NOT evaluated the security of this networking because I'm too lazy to setup a proxy or sniff my network to see what's going on. It DOES require you to create an account on the orbit site. So, with all this awesome sauce baked into the timer, why 4 stars instead of 5? I think I'm smarter than the smart watering schedule. I think there are a few kinks to be worked out in the software. Frankly, it's been cool enough that I still wouldn't even have my sprinkler system turned on yet. As I said we had a very wet weekend, with a large rain storm on Monday. Today is Wednesday. The smart watering schedule seems a little unsure of itself. For most of the weekend it was telling me it was going to start at 1:43 AM on Sunday. That sounded perfectly reasonable to me. But sometimes when I check it just says it is going to start at 10:00PM tonight (which is the earliest I told it that it could start). So I'm never quite sure what is going to happen, even when I look at the app. Well, I'm sitting here watching TV tonight, and sure enough the sprinklers turn on right at 10pm. I hit the "rain delay" button and specify a 24 hour delay. It then tells me it's going to start at 1:43 AM Monday. So the start time it was telling me all week was moved by 24 hours. Alright, whatever, but then I look back at the app a couple minutes later and it tells me it is going to start watering at 10pm tomorrow night. By selecting a zone in the app I can see that it last watered exactly a week ago, and it'll tell me how much time it plans to water with the smart watering. Since it plugs into the weather, it would be interesting if it would report rain in the watering timeline as well, but that would obviously be a feature request. It does also attempt to estimate the soil moisture for each zone, which I assume is a calculation based on the last watering time, duration, and temperature. Again, not sure if it takes weather into account. I expect given that this is a new product that the software will be worked out over time and it'll only get smarter. If I do the cups thingy and input that data then it'll get even better. Finally, this thing has prompted me to make be
