Useful but needs improvement ... – HydraWise Irrigation Review

I really like the idea of this app, The predictive watering all but eliminates the need for a rain sensor ... this alone makes the Hydrawise worthy of keeping. However, it could use one major improvement to make it more customizable and user friendly. With its current settings, to run multiple programs at different times/days during the week, and for different durations, you have to stack programs ... or use the remote function to adjust the duration and zones to water, but the remote function has to be set manually each time and can’t be set as a recurring program. The Preconfigured Program in the app defaults to your original watering duration time, in this case we’ll use 30 min, which it won’t let you adjust. To run a second program with a different duration you have to “stack” programs. An example of stacking would be if your normal watering time is 30 minutes at 7am, but you also wanted to syringe (spray or cool down) your lawn for 5 minutes at 4pm during the summer months ... the preconfigured watering program is almost useless in my opinion. To set up this program so you could syringe for 5 minutes, you would have to stack your main programs in 5 minute increments i.e. 7:00-7:05, 7:05-7:10, 7:10-7:15, 7:15-7:20, 7:20-7:25, 7:25-7:30, then you could set a schedule for syringing for 5 minutes at 4pm ... because now your main watering time is 5 minutes. Now imagine doing that for multiple zones .... and by the way, these are the instructions that Hunter has on their site!! With the state of technology today, and all of the great, fantastical, and mind boggling things we can do with it, I only have one question .... why, why, why, why, and why??? I guess I’m just having a hard time trying to understand why I can’t go in and set up a 2nd, 3rd, 4th program etc, at the time of my choosing, for the duration of my choosing, on the days of my choosing, without having to jump through all these hoops, and stacking programs, to get it done? This seems like it should be a fairly easy update to add .... shouldn’t it? Having to make all of these ridiculous work arounds to do something so simple rates a 3 Star review, bordering on 2 stars ... with a couple of tweaks though, this could easily be a 5 Star review and a 5 Star app.
Review by DyR6774 on HydraWise Irrigation.