Now that I’ve had some time to see how the flow meter integrates with the system I have some requests to make it even more useful. The way it is now it seems unnecessarily limited in functionality. I brought up a couple of these elsewhere but thought it might be good to have it all in one place.
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Always monitor the flow rate, even when not actively watering. I had a valve stuck open in my case but you might spring a leak in the valve box or anywhere after the flow meter and it won’t tell you you’re wasting potentially thousands of gallons. Send notifications whenever unexpected flow happens 24/7.
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Allow separate flow rate thresholds for notification and disabling. I like that it can stop watering when a leak is detected. However, if the leak is small I’d prefer it keep watering and just notify me. For example: notification threshold 105%; disable threshold 130%.
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Per zone calibration time. My drip/emitter zones take 2-3 minutes to fully pressurize. The popup zones might only take 30 seconds. Since I have to set the time globally for the system, all my zones have to wait 3 minutes to detect leaks. For the popup zones, that’s 30% of the watering time (with smart cycle so only about 10 minutes at a time) before it will do anything about a leak.
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Possible bug? When a leak was detected during a scheduled run in the first cycle of two smart cycles it notified me and said it would disable the zone. It still went on to try watering that zone again during the second smart cycle. It again detected the same leak and notified me. It shouldn’t have tried watering that zone the second time.