Temperature as a percent of watering time

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1

Have you thought about using temperature as a percent multiplier to the watering time set?

So if it’s 100 degrees (maybe take a rolling average of the past week’s avg. daily temp.) I would get 100% of my water time. If it’s 50 degrees water would run 50% of my time.

Just curious if this has been considered.

I know I can considerably lower watering when it’s cooler out which gave me this idea. I figured using 100 degrees F (temp as a percent) just keeps the math simple.

Jordan

2

@jredner‌ , thanks for the idea! We’re already sort of doing that, since temperature is a big part of our ET calculations. (You can get more info in ET here: https://www.rach.io/blog/The-Science-of-ET?p=3690274982371284200).

We’re rolling out a big update to our weather and scheduling code this week, using our new weather partner Aeris. That should get us more accurate recommendations to start with, and every two weeks, Water Budgeting will get weather forecasts & update your times as you go.

We’re actually looking at doing daily adjustments like you described down the road, but we need to take it slow & make sure that we’re doing it right.

3

This sounds great.

With a more real-time data feed, what is the rationale behind every 2 weeks as opposed to checking data on demand (at the beginning of each watering cycle)? Similar to a pilot checking the weather right before take-off to make sure it lines up with the forecast. Are 2 week forecasts pretty accurate in general for watering purposes?

Thanks again.

Jordan

4

@jredner‌ , that’s actually what we’re struggling with right now. When we first went live, we had an “automatic” mode that basically figured out when & how much to water. It was cool and automatic and smart – and people hated it. Part of that was because we didn’t have enough history & reporting to let everybody know exactly what the system was doing or to modify it, but part of it was just that it worked so different from any other sprinkler controller.

So we are currently working out how best to implement fully smart watering so people get lots of feedback & have lots of opportunities to fine-tune the results. You can expect to see the results in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, we’ll take all of the feedback we can get. We know that we don’t always have perfect descriptions of people’s lawn and irrigation system, so we can’t just rely 100% on the math–we’ll need people’s input as we go. What kind of control would you want to have? Would you rather have something as simple as “water more” and “water less”, or would you rather have more precise (and potentially complicated) controls, to really fine-tune the process?