Yes, thanks for the correction. I see now that the Flo and Rachio water meter products are very different. The former is a “whole house” product and the latter is more practically designed for irrigation only. Ironically, the Rachio is only available in a 1" line size and the Flo I bought is a smaller 3/4" line size to match my main water line – the 1" of the Rachio Everydrop wouldn’t add benefit in cases like mine where the upstream is a smaller diameter pipe.
Regarding the APIs, I believe the costs would be low for Moen to do this – and lowest for the community overall for it to do so. Rachio already has a webhook, which would notify Moen of the irrigation start. For its part, Moen would have to allow Flo users to register their relevant Rachio devices in the UI, creating a webhook for each registered device.
From that point, the Rachio cloud application would call a web endpoint that Moen defines (the “webhook”) every time various events happen. There are four that Moen would probably want to register their hook for:
SCHEDULE_STATUS:SCHEDULE_STARTEDSCHEDULE_STATUS: SCHEDULE_COMPLETEDZONE_STATUS:ZONE_STARTEDZONE_STATUS:ZONE_COMPLETED
The registration API allows Moen to pass their own data in a field called externalId. Since the webhook calls would come from Rachio at otherwise random times, the value of externalId would probably be an encrypted string that contains the information to securely locate the correct Flo device. Because only Moen has the decryption key and that the call was coming from Rachio, it could be sure the webhook call was valid.
After being notified about a Rachio starting behind a specific Flo device, the water alert would be skipped.
Additionally, Flo could apply its algorithms to the amount of water used during an irrigation to identify any anomalies in the schedules by learning the flow profiles of irrigation runs. If there was a water emergency elsewhere on the property during an irrigation run, Flo would easily be able to detect the problem as it normally does after subtracting the usage of the ongoing irrigation from the overall flow readings.
Flo does provide an API, its use is evidenced here. It also seems relatively easy to use, but it’s not as robust as the Rachio API. If the request relationship was reversed (ie Rachio making requests of Flo), the only thing Rachio could do with the existing Flo API is referenced above by @joylove. Putting the Flo to “sleep” is less desirable because the protection I referenced in the previous paragraph is no longer possible.
I know this is the wrong place to petition Moen to get this done, but we really shouldn’t be petitioning Rachio to do this.