Continuing the discussion from Confusion on Seasonal Adjustment:
I may be missing something here, but to me flex with limited watering days would have similar result to fixed with all the enhancements. The more fixed gets modified on the fly, the more people may be confused/scared. Fixed is great as a simple solution. It is also duplicate development effort (but perhaps lots of code can be shared). More value would be achieved in optimizing flex, in my outside opinion.
How about adding the following to Flex? A simple simulator that would show “typical” watering schedule under simple conditions? For example, let user enter “average daily high temp”, “average daily low temp”, “average humidity”, possibly partly sunny/sunny/etc. Assume moisture level starts as depleted. Assume no rain. This would allow user to show “what if” and decide if they have the parameters setup best for their situation.
Why? Based on my experience setting up flex this week, it is very difficult to feel comfortable with it out of the box. The forecast has been all over the place (rain expected, didn’t happen, changing future forecast). When I first set it up, depleted all the moisture in all the zones I saw future watering. Next thing I knew the forecast changed and now no water for 10 days. Did I set it up correctly? I think so, but only time will tell.
Other possible flex improvements -
- Table view of moisture level/graph for ALL the zones on a single page.
- Allowing scrolling forward/backwards, similar to the current view on individual zone tabs.
- Include expandable text detail info similar to zone tabs.
- Add watering time to the moisture level detail info (gives people more confidence in their inputs)
- Historical weather station data used for the calculations (makes it easy to tell if matches local conditions)
Ok, back to my real work