Improve messaging in history

I have an IFTTT recipe setup for triggering the 48 hour rain delay. Last night, even though I didn’t notice any rain, apparently IFTTT’s weather service did, and seems to have activated the delay on my Iro. I was completely unaware of this because there was no alert/notification. Is that a limitation or did I miss something during setup? I do get the usual ‘started/stopped’ notifications when the schedule runs.

Anyway, when I look in the history, it shows an entry for yesterday “rain delay…”. Would be nice if you could also include the source of this (IFTTT or user-initiated).

For today, the entry says " was not skipped since station BLAH observed 0.0 in…" It would be nice if the messaging could be improved - if a rain delay is known to be active, don’t say “watering was not skipped…”.

My user account is the same as my community nickname, in case you wish to review. Thanks.

I like this idea, will also help our customer support team. Next cloud deployment will include this.

If the rain delay is active at the time our weather intelligence job runs (1 hour before the schedule), we will say “schedule would have been skipped…”. This is to help people that don’t trust the weather intelligence and would like to see, even if the rain delay was active, if our system ‘would/would not have’ skipped the schedule.

:beers:

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@srvineet, IFTTT recipes have the option to send notifications. I wonder if you have it turned off for this recipe?

Awesome! Thanks @franz

Hmm, I did not see any option for notifications on my IFTTT recipe (I did not “create” the recipe - it says it was created by Rachio). Is there a new version that you can point me to? I will gladly give it a try - thanks.

Also, @franz, the message in my history log for today says " was not skipped since station BLAH observed 0.0 in…". I think this is confusing since Iro already knows about the rain delay being active since yesterday.

An example of a message I would have liked to see in my history today is “Rain delay is active, but would not have been skipped otherwise, since station BLAH recorded such and such…”

Think there is confusion, our app does not have that feature, but @emil is correct, think IFTTT has that as a separate feature.

Does it say ‘was not skipped’ or ‘would have been skipped’ ?

@franz: It says “…was not skipped…”.

I would like to bump this topic back up. We had a very very miniscule amount of rain yesterday (0.02in as reported by KNKX which is the NWS used by my Iro). To be honest, I would not even have bothered to set a rain delay had I been using an older timer.

Anyway, my IFTTT recipe for triggering a rain delay appears to have fired yesterday in the evening. I was not aware of this happening because that does not result in any push notification to the iOS app. However, when I looked at my history log this morning, it shows the rain delay coming from IFTTT. Thank you for implementing this suggestion, @franz. Could you also please consider implementing a push notification when any changes are made by external sources (such as IFTTT)? I would have actually liked to override the rain delay in this particular instance and let my normal schedule run today.

That being said, I would still like to complain about the messaging in the history. Even though yesterday’s log shows the rain delay being set, today’s log still says “zone was not skipped…”. The system did NOT run, so the zone was actually skipped (due to rain delay). I would say the existing verbiage is still confusing:

On a side note, even though we have water restrictions in Southern CA (which say no watering for 48 hours following any measurable rainfall), I’m beginning to wonder how useful IFTTT is - their weather station is at an unknown location and there is NO guarantee that my yard will be rained upon at the time they detect any rain. We’re already down to 2 allowed days a week and if such rain delays kick in and rob us of a valuable allowed watering opportunity, that’s not very good. What do other folks in this area do/think? Is it just better to let Iro manage everything based on the NWS (at least we know where it is and there is a slightly better chance of conditions being the same at our home)?

Ah good point. On my TODO list.

What would be better?

Largely agree. A PWS is probably the best route, either yours or one close by you trust :wink:

:beers:

How about just stating the actual facts? For example, if you know that rain delay is already active:

Station BLAH observed x.x in and predicted y.yin of precipitation. Total threshold is z.z in.
Weather intelligence recommendation is to [run | skip] , but rain delay is already in effect.

In the case of rain delay NOT already being active, its a similar but shorter message:
Station BLAH observed x.x in and predicted y.yin of precipitation. Total threshold is z.z in.
Weather intelligence recommendation is to [run | skip]

If the thing ends up running, it will anyway lead to extra entries (already implemented) generating the “watering…”, “started…”, “watered…” and “completed…” messages.

@srvineet Ok, will see what we can do.