Thanks again for making flex-app.rach.io available while you are working on making As Needed work the way it needs to.
In reviewing the results of recent watering, I noticed the following:
When you select a green drop watering date on the calendar, the projected run times are wacky. For example, my calendar currently shows a 2hr 51min cycle for the 25th, but only one zone is expected to run.
The moisture level calculations seem off. For example, one of my zones ran this morning for 6 cycles of 5 minutes each, with a head that puts down 0.5 in/hr. The moisture level add in the chart shows 0.45 in instead of the 0.25 in that was actually watered. This observation is true for all zones.
Last year I just looked at the total water times (I didn’t look at the moisture level to match those times, and now it looks like I should have). There were lots of total time issues when smart cycle got involved. For example, one day, by looking at the logs, actually watering was 120 minutes. Reported Duration was 208 minutes (I get that one since it had soak times doing nothing), but if you looked at the actual clock time for duration it was 211 minutes (rounding errors I’m guessing). On the Water Usage graph it showed 190 minutes (of that, drip time was 59 minutes, so lawn time was 131 minutes). And collecting the data using IFTTT it said 130 minutes. Not the 120 minutes from the logs.
On another day, it had (via the logs) a total lawn watering time of 102 minutes and drip time of 68 minutes, so 170 minutes of actual time with water running. But the water usage graph showed 143 minutes total! And collecting using IFTTT it had 109 minutes for the lawn and 68 minutes for the drip, so 177 minutes.
I started to address the issue with support last year. Now that my lawn watering season has started again, I’ll start tracking all of this again, only this time I’ll start looking at the reporting of the moisture level as well.
VERY interesting. I just went through all my zones with the minutes they run, the nozzle types, and figured out what the irrigating added should be.
Zones 1&2 nozzle is 1"/hour, they water 30 minutes each. Expect to see .50 for each, chart shows .45 for each
Zones 3&4 nozzle is 1.5"/hour, they water 18 minutes each. Expect to see .45 for each, chart shows .45 for each
Zones 5&6 nozzle is 1"/hour, they water 12 minutes each. Expect to see .20 for each, chart shows .45 for each
Zone 7 nozzle is .7"/hour, waters 42 minutes. Expect to see .49, chart shows .45
Either I’m not getting something, the chart displayed is in error, or the internal calculations are in error. Could be any of these!
And let’s try not hammer support on a feature that has been deprecated but resurrected to keep the expert natives happy for the moment. It just provides momentum for wan.
Agreed. These guys are awesome. I should not have pointed to this necessarily as a flex app error, it just happened I was using that app at the time. This issue is true regardless of the schedule that does the watering, so long as the Smart Cycle feature is being used.
I also agree 100% with you @plainsane. Support is totally awesome. I don’t know when these guys are sleeping or seeing their families and homes! And even more so, the response from the development team is wonderful. I used to work in IT and I know how difficult it is to deal with all the various levels of users, how hard it is to roll something new out, how things break when they get out to the field that didn’t break when you were testing it in house, and how long it can take to find the bug and get it fixed. It’s not an easy job, and I think they’ve done well with it. I fully expected a bunch of problems when the new release first rolled out, because that’s just the way it normally works. So a big thumbs up to @emil and @franz who I see on the forums all the time and all hours of the day and night.
And like @stonecliff , I see the problems when smart cycle is involved. It has nothing to do with flex. And I absolutely LOVE that the moisture level details are exposed to us. I am one of those people who don’t trust the system with blind faith (probably all those years in IT made me that way!) and seeing just this level of decision making in what water my zones got and why it’s going to water next. It gives me more confidence in the product.
Thanks for this, I’m going to work with @emil on this next week. We feel like this is deja vu since I know we’ve double and triple checked the calculations, but we believe you might have found some minor issue in how the amount of water to be applied is being calculated. Don’t want to jump to any conclussions until we review our algorithms again. It’s been running for almost a year, so very surprising that we are revisting this Thanks for being a power user and bringing this to our attention. Minor details like this are what usually keep me up at night.
Ok, we ran, and re-ran these numbers and believe everything adds up.
Based on your current configuration (nozzle output, efficiency, RZD, AWC, etc.) for zone 1 it takes .45 inches of water to fill the bucket. The runtime for that is 33 minutes. The system watered for exactly 33 minutes and we recorded .45 inches.
If your nozzle efficiency was 100%, than we would have had a runtime of less than 30 minutes.
If you’d like more info, a lot of algorithms were derived from this manual.
Do you water in minutes and seconds, and only report the minutes? That would make sense with what I am seeing since it is going to 6 cycles, each showing 5 minutes, which is why I think I’m only seeing 30 minutes. And if you are actually watering in minutes and seconds, that would explain alot to me.
But what about zones 5 & 6? Other than exposure (and slope on zone 1 is moderate while the others are all flat) they are defined identical to zones 1 & 2., which want to water 33 minutes each, and 5 and 6 want to water 16 minutes each(from the old app) and 17 minutes each (from the new app). (I have a support question in with @emil, so I don’t want you to be duplicating effort on answering this for me).
Yes, what you visualize will be rounded, everything we send to the controller is in seconds.[quote=“Linn, post:10, topic:3560”]
But what about zones 5 & 6? Other than exposure (and slope on zone 1 is moderate while the others are all flat) they are defined identical to zones 1 & 2., which want to water 33 minutes each, and 5 and 6 want to water 16 minutes each(from the old app) and 17 minutes each (from the new app). (I have a support question in with @emil, so I don’t want you to be duplicating effort on answering this for me).
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It’s just sad, I love flex but I’m tired of doing the math on my own zone to validate the graph, I could only imagine the hell that y’all go through.m and rinse repeat for,every new user that comes on line. I get why you want to throw it in the trash.
I knew there was not a bug here when you posted last night. that code got the hell beat out of it last year, but as a user of the forum It’s hard to help because you need ALL the data of the zone in question and I just don’t have the time to stop and help on that type of question. I have 3 kids a wife and my own code to manage.
@Franz, thanks for your continued detailed explanations.
My question at the beginning of this thread and the other one (Moisture level calculations seem off) wasn’t really about the calculation of how much water to put down (“to fill the bucket”), it was more of an observation that the amount shown as having put down didn’t align with the times that were actually being watered.
This is not at all about Flex, more about the affect that Smart Cycle might be having on the amount of water being recorded as being put down.
Smart cycle is just breaking up your exact watering time into smaller intervals.
Note that the display will have rounding errors since we don’t display seconds.
If visual rounding errors don’t account for what you are seeing, please PM me all the data.
It’s very expensive for us to provide any detailed analysis, so unless something truly looks like a defect or some other issue, I’ll defer to our existing documentation.
Thanks for being a power user and bringing this to our attention. Minor details like this are what usually keep me up at night. 
