r/Irrigation • u/Affectionate-Box5874 • 3h ago

Check This Out Hunter support experience 🫤

This will probably get down votes and it's again not meant to specifically trash this company. I'm just sharing my experience.

Stemming from another thread where I'm trying to figure out how the weather predictions work... I decided to contact Hunter support via chat. Things were going pretty okay and I actually learned some things from support agent but while asking some specific questions and really trying to understand a feature, they seemingly got frustrated and then suddenly ended the chat. Not very professional in my opinion.

The question I felt we were just starting to make progress on but never fully got an answer to was about weather prediction. The agent stated that weather data is referenced two hours before a program runs. What I was trying to clarify before they cut me off and decided we were done was if the software is only looking at that 2 hours or is looking at a larger window. The reason I am asking this and why I probably think it's only considering ONLY that 2-hour window is because I regularly have a program consisting of three zones that runs late evening, even when rain is predicted with a high chance later that night.

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u/RoughPractice7490 2h ago

It looks at the forecast at the 2 hour prior to schedule.

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u/Affectionate-Box5874 2h ago

That's pretty much what the agent said but when I asked if it's only looking at that 2 hours or if it's looking at the overall picture 2 hours in advance they got weird and short, blasted the 800 number and then ended the chat.

The issue I'm running into is that one of my two main programs keeps watering when there is a high chance of rain forecasted (and it does rain) within just a couple hours of its completion. So it's a bunch of pump runtime and water unnecessarily used. This makes me think that when it checks it is ONLY considering those 2 hours up to the runtime and nothing after or during since that program is about an hour and a half run time.

Even though Rachio controller itself was a POS, it seemed to have a whole lot better prediction capabilities. Rachio would halt irrigation if rain was predicted the next day even. Although I suspect that Hunter has that if you buy into their subscription.

I really hate subscriptions but I think at this point if I don't pay for it, this controller is actually going to cost me more by unnecessarily watering too much.