I have been playing around with some home automation ideas & wanted to get your take on something. I hooked up my Rachio with a few other smart home devices & I am trying to get the watering schedule to adapt based on local weather + some internal rules I created using Home Assistant. It is a bit of a work-in-progress but the goal is to avoid overwatering without depending solely on the default weather intelligence.
Also, if anyone here has explored integrating more advanced analytics into your irrigation setup? Using data logs to tweak schedules over time? I wrapped up a splunk course for work & now my brain wants to monitor everything😄
I want to hear how others are optimizing their setups, any cool hacks or automations that make your lawn care smarter without making it over-complicated.
I don’t have those kind of algorithms, but for some outdoor pots I instead use some Ecowitt soil sensors. I have HA check the Moisture level daily, and when below a predefined level it has Rachio irrigate that zone. It works great given how much our temps change here in AZ.
I have Flex set up for everything else in my yard, but found Flex was very tricky to dial in for concrete pots. The soil sensors and HA combo worked quite well instead.
In terms of splunk, or others such as wazuh, prometheus, and grafana, you won’t get useful data points to monitor other than set user variable parameters. For instance, the ETc values and current water levels, which could be useful is not included in the API calls. You can only view that with Flex Daily → moisture log only viewable within the app.
In terms of automation, you may have to read through their API to see what it can do of use to you and experiment with it. Things that can be done to me that’s useful is starting a zone for a specific duration which is useful for things like syringing and setting moisture levels/percentages. One bug I found is that the set seasonal adjustment doesnt work or I may be doing something wrong.
Since I am in California, the CIMIS data on ET0 seems to be very accurate compared to the in app forcasting via hyper local or national forecast (depending how far away you live from it, if you are close then use national forecast). Btw, I don’t trust hyper local because I have driven to many of the spots where those stations are located and they are definitely improperly mounted (quite a systematic issue). CIMIS has research grade stations designed for ET0 measurements. In such a case, I can query CIMIS data and have a local script keeping track of my current available water based on root depth, take in the et0, probably take in precipitation data from what ever source such as a local rain guage, then calculate the moisture level based on that data and crop coefficient. Then set the moisture amount via an API PUT request. You can even query accuweather api, get their hourly values for a specific 24 hours and manually calculate your ETo based on FAO56 equation.
These are useful automations but can be used to dial in or tweak the Flex Daily to a Tee to get a set and forget experience. I can eye ball the graph provided in a reply and see that the trend and seasonals from that time-series graph follows a predictable pattern. You can probably train a machine learning model on that data and predict with extreme accuracy.
