We will be promoting all of our 1.7 water budgeting and weather intelligence changes to production this weekend or early next week to coincide with the mobile release(s). Weather intelligence will now take a more holistic approach to rain delay and look at your true watering needs versus only raw precipitation thresholds. Using ET (evapotranspiration) based rain delay, weather intelligence will no longer be limited to only looking at the past & future 24 hours for weather intelligence. ET rain delay will monitor the true moisture deficit threshold within your soil and skip your water schedule accordingly – eliminating excess waterings when not needed by looking back to your last watered schedule and forward to your next water schedule. We are still trying to determine the optimal deficit threshold level.
I have attached a screenshot of the ET rain delay email. This will be changing to make it more readable but provides the gist of the information.
Here are the new water budget modifications that are also being released.
@franz
So is this the feature that will adjust the watering times dynamically so that if it rained but only a little then the watering times would adjust to fulfill the remaining needed amount? And the other situations discussed in other posts?
@jeremyshultz We are still taking two approaches. The first is water budgeting which will now run every week and treat ET like a trendline, adjusting slightly up/down every week. The great thing is that this will be tied to the seasonal adjustment dial, so you can manually fine tune if necessary. Weather intelligence is getting smarter and will look back 24 hours, forward 24 hours like it does now. It will also look to the last time you watered, the next time you are watering, and determine based on cumulative ET and cumulative precipitation if there is enough of an overage to skip. Hopefully early next year these two approaches are combined into one. We are iterating and measuring each change that goes in which I think will ultimately allow us to collapse everything into one ‘smart water’ feature. Let us know if you have any questions or feedback. Thanks!
