Hydrawise HC 12-Station Indoor Irrigation Controller

Go with rainmachine. This was uterly useless. Bad integration with smart hubs and they require extra money to pick a water station close to you. Also, no way to know which sprinkler is on and when the scheduled watering schedule is coming or being cancelled. There is just no data which is key for anything that is labelled "smart". Hunter basically bought out a smart sprinkler company and stiffled their growth.

Easy install & to program

OK, You can tell from the title I'm a little angry.In a rare occurrence, I bought this device without doing a ton of research. A friend of mine recommended it, I trust him, and I'm busy, so I bought it.I did get the most important thing I wanted, which is the ability to drive my sprinklers from my phone. That works. The user interface could be better, but it doesn't stink, and it's a lot better then those manual controllers with the giant dial :)BUT... in addition to the phone control, this device had the "promise" of being able to control the watering of my lawn based on the weather for my neighborhood. If it's going to rain, the sprinklers would not run. If a storm came though, the sprinklers would not run. I was really excited about this.So one day, a small weather cell passes by, and we get a ton of rain dumped on us. Then two hours later, the sprinklers are running. Huh? So I check the app to see where it's getting the weather from. It lists all the weather stations near me, and sure enough there is one about 1/2 mile from here. That station clearly knew that a lot of rain had recently fallen, so I select that station as my "home" station. That's when they finally tell me, "Oh, if you want good weather data from nearby stations, that costs extra!" WHAT ?!?!?!? Yup., they want $65 a year to deliver what they promised, or I can keep getting my weather from some unknown regional airport not nearly close enough to my home. Well that stinks! It's a total bait-and-switch deal. Hence my anger.I am now doing some research to possibly replace this device with one of several that appear to offer the hyper-local weather without additional fees.If that local weather info isn't important to you, you can buy this device. It's decent.

I did a lot of research on different controllers and the Hunter Hydrawise seemed like a good fit for my needs. I have used several different controllers over the years. My last one died after 3 years of use so I wanted to switch brands. This controller was easy to install, easy to configure and the web interface and mobile app are nice. There is just one HUGE drawback that you all need to know. Most Hydrawise controllers have 2 modes. A standard mode, and an advanced mode. With the Hunter Hydrawise HC model (the one most homeowners would probably purchase), you can't change between the standard mode and the advance mode. You are stuck with the advance mode. What this means is, you CANNOT have different watering times for different zones. For example, my Zone 1 is my front yard. I would like to water it for 30 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening when it gets really hot outside. Nope, can't do it with this model. When you create a zone, you set a default watering time for that zone, say 30 minutes. When you create schedules, you cannot tell the scheduler how long you want that zone to run. You HAVE to run it for the default number of minutes. Of course you can always manually run zones but who wants to mess with that. The point of a controller is to build schedules and walk away. Pretty disappointing considering the cost of this controller. I have used cheaper ones that had more control over your watering zones and times.

Based on reviews, I had high expectation on this product. This is made very cheaply - which makes it difficult to install. For $175 controller, the maker of this product does not even have a panel to draw the connectors to the terminals. The terminals are inaccessible from outside the box. Second, you can drive the wires into the box - read this carefully - only if you cut open at slot in the plastic casing of the controller. I have never before seen a retail product in life which required a post sale tooling other than a screwdriver or a hex key wrench. I tried hard to cut open the box with a standard box cutter knife for about 15 minutes and gave up on the verge of injuring myself. I worked as an embedded controller (what is called IOT these days) engineer for 15 years. All the parts included in this box do not add to a production cost of $25. With this huge profit margin, this company could not come up with an easily opened 1/2 " x 2" panel for diving in the cables. This is the reason why I returned the product.