The Rainbird controller would then skip the watering automatically whenever the sensor sensed water.

This is good and works but does not include the smartness of today’s world.

To get smarter and skip the watering if there is a weather forecast for rain on the day of the pre-set watering schedule, you need something that can connect to local weather stations.

We bought Rachio 3 for the same purpose and my experience is that it does work in real time.

City Rebates on Smart Sprinklers

Most cities in the USA promote installing smart sprinklers (which RainBird is not) and subsidize the purchase and installation cost.

In our case, the City was paying a maximum of $75 for purchase (including installation).

The Rachio controller normally sells for about $200 in the open market but Costco and Samsclub usually run deals in winter.

We timed our Rachio 3 with 12 Zones from Costco for $100 in January. Here is the current deal from Amazon for 16 Zone version:

With the City’s subsidy, the final cost to replace our Rainbird controller with Rachio was $25.

We have saved this much on our water bill due to automatic watering schedule changes and rain forecast watering skips that Rachio does on its own.

How to Find City Rebate

Rachio has a dedicated page for finding the rebate that your city is running for installing smart sprinkler controllers.

Enter your zip code and press ‘Update’ to see the rebates available in your area through the local city water management department.

Installation

Rachio installation is pretty easy and you can do it yourself.

If you have RainBird installed, you will just need to take a picture of the existing wire connections and just plug those wires into the Rachio controller.

Rachio does not need screws. Only plugging the wire works in this smart switch.

It won’t take more than 15 minutes. Rachio also gives you access to your controller via a free smartphone app.

The Rachio app features that I tried and liked:

1. Smart scheduling means that Rachio will adjust the watering days per month automatically based on the local weather.
   • Connects to the local city weather station and skips watering on days when it is expected to rain or has rained. This is pretty useful.
   • Even though we can adjust the watering schedule manually, the best part is that it adjusts the monthly watering schedule automatically based on the season.
2. Smart Start and End times
   • Intelligent enough to start and end watering at the time of night when the evaporation is lowest to save water.
3. Cycle & Soak
   • Intelligent watering technique in a round-robin fashion to increase water absorption by the soil.
   • Water for like 3 minutes and then let the soil soak for another 3 minutes and then water again for another 2 minutes.
   • All these times are managed automatically if you select the ‘Cycle and Soak’ feature in the Rachio app.

Rainbird WiFi & Smartphone App -$$

Rainbird, on the other hand, sells the wifi connector separately easily costing about $100 extra over and above their controller.

Once you install this Rainbird WiFi module (hardware) on the RainBird Controller, you will be able to access the app on your phone.

The app is still not smart enough to connect to weather stations and automatically make decisions on skipping watering. The only benefit I found with their app is to change watering or trigger quick runs through the phone.

FAQ

The post Does Smart Sprinklers Save Water Bill? Tried Rachio with $75 City Rebate & Saved 30% on Regular bill appeared first on AM22Tech.

This will cost you about $14 per terabyte after taxes. We have ordered one and will use this drive ourselves for backups of our photos and videos and in our NAS setup. Yes, we are moving towards creating our own NAS (home-based network storage) to save cloud storage costs.

I am not sure why the price of a 14TB drive is cheaper than the 12 TB drive. You will find that a 12TB HDD or even 10TB HDD drive sells for about $250. Maybe the 14TB hard disks are not made anymore and hence Seagate is trying to sell off the leftover stock.

Whatever the reason, we are buying it and hope to have a useful life of at least 3 years. Note that we say 3 years because all hard drives have a limited life like batteries. They do fail at some point. Some fail in 1 year and others in 3-5 years. So, you should keep taking backups.

Is it Cheaper than Google Drive or Dropbox?

This will be cheaper than paying for Google Drive or Dropbox if you consider the per-year storage cost.

We own Google Pixel phones which used to come with unlimited photo storage until they abruptly stopped it last year. Now, we are forced to buy Google Drive space which costs $10/ month for 2 TB storage per month per user.

Even Dropbox costs the same as a drive.

If you are seriously considering creating a storage option at your home due to the higher costs of cloud storage (like Microsoft Drive, Google Drive, or Dropbox), we would recommend this external device which can be connected to an old laptop or computer to create a self-hosted Drive at your own home.

Other sellers

Amazon is selling this 14TB Seagate expansion drive for the same price of $179.99 but without the free SD card. Interestingly, the seller on Amazon is Newegg Business.

Costco has the same hard drive for about $199.99 but is showing it as out of stock at this time.

One of the Reddit users reported that Costco had a minimum sale price of $149.99 in late 2023 for the same item. We could not find it on Costco at this time.

Samsclub which usually carries the same deals as Costco is not showing any hard disk data storage deals in 10TB or more space.

Best Buy has this drive for sale at $300+

The post Seagate 14TB External Drive at $179.99 for Home back up NAS is best value per TeraByte appeared first on AM22Tech.