Wanted to let the community know what we are targeting for 1.6.
- Seasonal adjustment dial. This will allow applying a global adjustment across all zones in a watering schedule.
- Water usage report
- Summary report
- More reports?
How do you calculate the gallons used?
The water usage will be an estimate, so we’re going to use the data we have, and make some assumptions about the data we don’t. We can estimate inches/hour based on the nozzle type. That, plus square footage of each zone (which we don’t have, but are estimating a typical 1000 sqft), can be plugged in to our formulas to get an estimate of gallons/minute. Of course, we know how long each zone has been watered in a given period, so we can come up with total water used.
In the future, we’d like to allow technical users or irrigation professionals to enter in their square footage and inches/hour for each zone exactly, at which time those folks will be able to get very accurate estimates. Unfortunately, most people don’t know that stuff, so we’ll always have to be able to come up with a reasonable number.
It seems to me that simply asking the number of heads per zone at setup (somethign anyone could easily count while they look to see which zone turned on) would allow a pretty accurate calculation given that you already know the type of head. This nonsense about estimating zone area is a really really bad way to do it since the area that can be covered per zone can vary by orders of magnitude depending on the type of head!
Using the number of heads in turn assumes that the yard has the correct number and spacing of heads for the area and that the water pressure is sufficient, which, unfortunately, is not always the case. But, that’s a different approach, and we’ll keep it in mind going forward. Thanks for the feedback!
What about the ability to enter the local cost of water? The Wemo app allows for this to happen with electricity and thought it’d be a good way to see dollars saved too.
I’d like to see the ability to block out a days of the week for watering. For instance, my lawn service arrives on Fridays. I don’t want to water on Fridays, regardless of my watering schedule.
Will the seasonal adjustment dial be based on percentage, using the planned schedule and watering durations as a baseline. I would be able to adjust to 70% or 120% from the baseline?
@SteinyD Yes. We will start with a baseline of 0 and then the dial will go from -90% to +90%. Let us know if you have any more questions.
Thanks!
I was thinking of something like this. We just got a crazy heat wave and my yard went to brown in about a week. I know you are working to have more updates to the systems for weather, but if there was a simple “click here if your yard isn’t green enough” button or a dial, that would be great
Sounds cool. Do you have an ETC?
@Jmaditto Working on the charts and graphs, hoping to wrap everything up sometime next week and then however long it takes to go through the app submittal process.
Is there any way to make the schedules more dynamically adjust based on rainfall, temperature, wind, etc?
Or add a temperature between x and y times trigger for zones?
@jeremyshultz @franz @chris Jeremy’s request is something I have been used to within the Hunter system I have (provided details to Chris in another thread). Based on the weather sensor I have had with the Hunter system, the irrigation durations and even whether or not it would cancel an irrigation schedule - was based on the actual events based on humidity levels, how much it HAS rained within the last x hours, temperatures, etc. The system would either cancel watering altogether, increase durations by x percentage or reduce durations by x percentage all from a baseline I set at the beginning of the season. Having to scale up and down via the new features of 1.6 is a good first step but still leaves us with manual intervention throughout the season.
@jeremyshultz @SteinyD @chris Thanks for the great feedback. This is one of the highest priorities on our roadmap and we are actively building towards this.
Hello, I really like the Smart Cycle feature. However, I noticed that once a cycle has started, that cycle has to completely finish before the next will begin even if it was scheduled to start sooner. Since the Smart Cycle has a lot of downtime between runs, why can’t other cycles run during another cycle’s rest time. This seems to make much more sense. Otherwise, if you have several cycles to run, you won’t get your watering done until mid morning or later even if you start hours before the sun comes up. Thanks.
To coslor- I wrote another post in the analytics section about not being able to effectively use evapotranspiration data without knowing how much water you are laying down. Your post about most people not knowing how much water they are using on their lawns may be correct but it is easy enough to have people who want to know do something simple like the “tuna can test”. I can appreciate the need for a generic approach, but for a $250 controller that clearly has the capability of providing much more, please put in the more “advanced” data options of water/hour, exact crop coefficients, square footage, etc. sooner than later. Thanks.
@jasonc Can you explain your smart cycle question a little more? Here is a breakdown of how it currently works.
http://www.support.rach.io/article/98-smart-cycle-faq
Thanks!
I believe what I’m trying to get across is difficult because I may not be using your terminology. I can best describe it by showing you two screenshots and then explaining the problem. As you can see I have 3 programs, or “watering times” as I think you call them, setup. The problem is when the “Water the lawn” time occurs on the same day as the “Flowers” water time. When this happens, then it is scheduled to completely finish the “Water the Lawn” program before the Flowers program begins. As you can see in the schedule snapshot, the first time the Flowers program runs is at 7:15am even though it is set to begin at 5:30am. I think this better shows what I am talking about. So what I’m proposing is that the Flowers time would begin at the first available open slot, which would actually be at the normal start time of 5:30 anyway since the Water the Lawn program would be on a rest. In other words, if there are several “watering times” that are set to occur, and the smart cycle is causing them to run into each other, why can’t the scheduler mesh them together taking advantage of the rest times instead of pushing the next “watering time” out until the previous one is completely done, causing your total watering time for all areas to be pushed later into the day. I hope this explanation makes more sense. thanks.
On a somewhat unrelated note, it seems counter-intuitive to me that you can have these “water times” set up with what zones to run, the duration, smart cycle option, etc. for a scheduled run, but there is no way of just running one of these as a one-off type situation. Sometimes I want to just run my flowers for an extra cycle on a super hot day. But unless I actually change the start time in the app (and then have to change it back later), the only other way is to go and manually start a valve, and if I happen to have two valves in the same area I have to wait for the first valve to finish and then manually start the next valve. Not to mention the manual run doesn’t include a smart cycle option as far as I can tell. It seems much easier to just be able to say run this already preprogrammed “water time” once right now.
Nitpicking here- the term “program” seems to make more sense to me than “water time” in the context of the app. Then you could say “run this program now”
I just read some other posts and it looks like you are working on being able to do a single run of a watering time so please disregard that request. Thanks. still think the word “program” seems less confusing than “watering time” though.