A Rain Master Eagle-i Irrigation Controller recently stolen out of a housing development just outside of Tucson traveled nearly 80 miles before rescuing itself. The smart controller is now back in place on the wall where it was originally pinched.

“The thieves were run over by technology and they had no idea what hit them,” said Jim Sieminski, Chief Engineer at Rain Master, about the incident. “In this day and age, something that may look passive like an irrigation controller may not be so passive. The thieves didn’t realize they were removing equipment that features 2-way wireless communications via the Internet.”

Technology tells the stolen controller story

Last November, a Maintenance Supervisor working for The Groundskeeper™, a commercial landscape management company, received an error message from one of the 16 Rain Master Eagle-i controllers spread across Continental Ranch, a housing development in the Tucson suburb of Marana, Arizona.

“We’re able to do the programming and communicate to the controllers through our laptops or Blackberries,” said Glen Killmer, a branch manager for The Groundskeeper™ who is in charge of the Continental’s acreage. “This particular controller had stopped communicating.”

A Groundskeeper irrigation technician sent to the site discovered that the piece of equipment, worth several thousand dollars, had disappeared.

Given the late autumn season, it was not necessary for Killmer to immediately replace the Eagle. He held out hope that perhaps the controller would turn up, even though the Marana Police Department informed him that was highly unlikely.

Three weeks later, the unexpected happened. The Maintenance Supervisor noticed a signal coming in from the stolen controller. “He thought it was kind of odd that it was up and running,” said Killmer. “Whoever had stolen it had plugged it back in.”

After sending a signal to the controller to go into rain shut-down mode, Killmer contacted Kevin Johnson of John Deere’s Green Tech Division, the local Tucson distributor for Rain Master. Killmer asked Johnson if it was possible to locate the controller via the third party wireless carrier that monitors the signals to see if a location for the controller could be found.

Johnson thought it might be possible because the controller was a 2-way system rather than just a 1-way.

“The 2-way is what sets the Rain Master Controller apart from its competitors,” explains Johnson.