Watering strategy when Iro is off line

I had a router problem that prevented a flex daily schedule from running today. See WEB user interface improvement

What is the default strategy for running schedules with the Iro offline? The WEB app shows “Garden was scheduled to run but device is currently offline.” Does the Iro know that it was scheduled to run? Or is the schedule only “set” an hour before via the internet interface? If the Iro knew of the pending run it would be nice if it assumed nothing had changed the need if it was off line.

The flex schedule has been running every other day in the current climate situation. It would have been really helpful if the Iro defaulted to continuing that schedule while not on line as that would be the most reasonable assumption of watering needs.

There seems no way to manually run a flex daily schedule. So recovering from this missed schedule is a bit complicated. Yes, it will run tomorrow, but it really needed to run today (as it predicted.)

Agreed, I want to incorporate this back. For now either creating a disabled schedule to run manually is probably the best option. I understand its not ideal.

I also want to incorporate something that will continue to try and set the flex schedule until the device comes back online.

:cheers:

Sounds good. Fortunately the router was working this morning, so the flex schedules went as projected.

But this all gives me concern for when I might be traveling and not able to fix router issues.

@sbillard

This thread explains the current controller backup strategies.

Device offline = Not watering?

Thanks for the thread pointer. One suggestion if possible. The Flex schedule predicts when it will water pretty far out. Maybe the default offline interval could be the average interval from the predicted runs. A three day interval would stress my plants during the summer months. Right now the schedule is running a little more often than every other day.

@sbillard I’d like to have this configurable someday, adding the average is harder than it sounds :wink:

:cheers:

I understand it might be hard to add averages. But remember that these are unpredictable events, so manual configurations are likely to be out of date vis the current climate unless the configuration is somehow calendar based.

Further question:

Today the router failed again. I manually watered the garden that was supposed to run flex once the router restarted. (Again, I would prefer a strategy that told the Iro NOT to water an hour ahead of a scheduled flex if the weather conditions so indicate. Much better failure mode.)

But my question is what happened with my fixed schedule. I have a fixed schedule that should water at 6AM daily. the watering history says that each of the zones on the schedule watered starting at 9:01AM. Normally I get an entry starting and stopping the schedule as well as the individual zone waterings. In this case these entries were not present.

So, when did the schedule actually run? On schedule at 6AM or when the internet returned at approximately 9AM?

A secondary request would be to show the on line/off line transitions in the device status log.

They ran at 6AM, but when the controller reconnected at 9AM it sent us the backlog of watering events.

Which is a pretty cool feature, but we should use the timestamp from the actual event, and not when we finally received the events from the controller.

So, yeah us for running offline and capturing the events, but boo us for using the incorrect timestamp.

On my list of fixes, but not a high priority at the moment :wink:

:cheers:

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