RainPoint-TY

Bought this system to replace an Orbit B-hyve smart water system. After using it a year, I’m not sure I’m any better off. The devices like the WiFi Hub and irrigation timer work as expected. Once I had it setup, I have not had any connectivity issues. So, those components are okay. The app is one of the worst I’ve seen. The interface is bizarrely confusing with a lot of odd features to connect to other home network devices. The navigation is not intuitive. It’s easy to get lost or unable to find your way back to a screen. The app automations based on weather don’t work properly because the app weather forecast is not accurate. For example, I set up a rain delay if it starts to rain. It’s cloudy and raining right now, the app says it’s sunny outside. Not even close. The app “help” page just tells me to wait for the weather to update, which should happen every ten minutes. For the record, it does NOT update regularly and it’s certainly longer than 10 minutes. This shortcoming is a dealbreaker for me. The watering schedule works well enough for when you finally figure out how to use it. It’s full of components that don’t even seem usable or functional. As if the developers intended to build it one way, changed the plan midway, and left all the disabled components from the original plan. Very sloppy. Overall, I guess I prefer it to my old Orbit system, but just barely.

Review from an actual UX designer: So I love the functionality of the system itself, but the app UI leaves much, much to be desired. For one, there is no way to view history. So if I want to know when was the last few times the sprinkler turned on and for how long, I don’t have that data. Also, I’ve often pressed buttons in the app and there has been no change in state. Recently I tried to enable a 24hr rain delay and i couldn’t. The button didn’t change. Now it might have been a connection issue but there was no way for me to know, the app didn’t tell me anything. It lets me press a button but then nothing changes. I also run into this quite frequently when trying to manually turn on a sprinkler. I’ll press a button and nothing will happen. The way that irrigation plans are displayed is very confusing and forces me to scan too much info. I want to see a schedule or a calendar and see what’s coming up. I don’t want to have to parse everything myself. There’s no way to change to a DD/MM/YYYY date format, which is very frustrating. There doesn’t appear to be a way to reset or delete an irrigation plan, only a disable control. And you can only have three plans per spigot, which is frustrating. The UI for creating “Scenes” is so inscrutable, I don’t even use it. The general information architecture of the app is terrible.

I really like this product. We have rental property that’s five hours away and wanted to keep the landscaping watered. The app allows me to control everything remotely. I’ve never had any problems activating the water. I think the app could be laid out a little bit better and some of the terminology on the app isn’t all that clear, but I figured it out. Overall I’m very happy with the system.