Rachio Smart Hose Timer

The Smart Hose Timer bolts onto a standard faucet and talks to a Wi-Fi hub, so the watering schedule lives in an app rather than in your head. It reads local weather and skips a cycle when rain is already doing the job, and the system expands valve by valve when one outlet is not enough. Wirecutter's top pick in the category is less about features than about the one failure it removes: coming home to a flooded lawn because a mechanical timer did not care about the forecast. Buy it if your watering routine keeps getting rained out; skip it if you already run a full in-ground irrigation controller.