Flex daily, how does it compare to Hydrawise?

Hello everybody,

I own a self-designed and self-installed irrigation system based on Hunter PGP, the equality is reasonably well. The lawn is watered by three stations at 9-11gpm, all in the same schedule as they fill the hydrozone together. Deviation from the average precipitation is nowhere above 10%.

Still, I haven’t yet found my final irrigation controller.

My ideal controller should act like a moisture sensor: Account for soil depletion and re-water when the soil is down to a safe minimum.

I bought us a Hydrawise HC-1200 controller for two reasons:

1.) The system is officially supported in Germany.
2.) Hunter claims that their “smart schedule” can do what I want.

I found that Hydrawise does not really live up to their promise:

  • This july started extra-hot, but the weather dropped about 10 days ago. Since then, noon temperatures are just slightly above 20°C (68°F). Hydrawise still claims an evaporation of 5-7mm (1/5-1/14 inch). This is absolutely unrealistic for the current temperatures. The chart I use claims 2-3mm at these temperatures.

  • Rain is not well accounted for. We just had 5mm of rain on Friday and 7mm on Saturday, temperatures dropped to 17°C (62°F). Hydrawise said the zones were almost depleted and wanted to water one zone on Sunday, the other two on Monday. I paused watering, and empirically the lawn is very well watered - lush dark green, moist feel.

It seems as if Hydrawise relies more on historical averages than the current weather. Support was not helpful, they suggested changing to a time-based schedule instead of a smart schedule. Hey, I bought this controller so it adjusts the days between watering for me. So, please… :-/

This wonderful brick of broken promises is still within the return period.

So, I am thinking about switching to Rachio, although they don’t officially sell to Germany.

  • Does Rachio calculate the state of the lawn more realistically than Hydrawise, and can it account for unusual cold/hot weather well?
  • Should I expect the same accuracy in Germany that you guys get in the US? I don’t know about the quality of weather predictions for Germany from your provider. I have a Netatmo PWS that feeds to Wunderground, so tapping into hyperlocal weather is not a problem.

Or should I bite the cost-bullet and hook a moisture sensor to my system?

Thanks a lot,

Detlev

Yes. We track moisture levels daily, using real time weather and precipitation data from PWS of your choosing.

https://support.rachio.com/hc/en-us/articles/115010379367-What-are-moisture-levels-Flexible-Daily-Schedules-

We can definitely use WU stations for precipitation. For forecasting and weather observations put in your location here and see how close we can get.

https://wx.aerisweather.com

:cheers:

Franz, thank you for your fast reaction. Actually, Hydrawise does the same claims for their smart schedules. I found at my own expense that Hunter fails at this, though.

What would be nice: If it was possible to setup a virtual controller without hardware, and see how the system reacts over a few days. Are you aware this is possible with Hydrawise? I don’t think it would be much effort, the calculations are done on the server anyway.

If you create an account, DM me your email address, I can share one of our controllers with you to experiment on.

:cheers: