I just installed my IRO yesterday and it has been raining quite a bit here in San Diego County over the last two days. My lawn and other zones won’t need watering for several days at the earliest. Our drought rules allow me to water on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday only and the system scheduled irrigation on Sunday, which would be inappropriate. I had it on a PWS nearby but when I read about the potential issues with those I checked the data and it was incorrectly showing the rainfall totals. I then switched the PWS off and deleted all schedules and watering times to start over using the weather data from the non-PWS source. Again, the system shows watering starting tomorrow.
I initiated a manual rain delay and the app shows that watering will start on Tuesday. It would seem to me that when we have gotten significant rain and the weather is cloudy and cool the system should have aborted the Sunday watering automatically. Perhaps it would have but I set the weather delay manually because there was no advance indication that the watering would be cancelled.
Does the system determine in advance whether to water or does it do it at the time the schedule is about to start? If I were to cancel my manual rain delay would the system look at the weather over the last few days and cancel the watering anyway? How do I know?
Thanks for reaching out to us. We appreciate you purchasing our device.
So in regards to your watering time showing as running tomorrow, this is normal behavior. The way that our weather intelligence feature works is that an hour before your watering time starts we are reviewing the local weather based on the weather station that you chose. In you scenario the NWS that you reverted to. Then based on the total observed and predicted rainfall we are skipping if we meet or exceed the threshold that you set for that specific watering time. So for instance, if you have the watering time set for an 1/8 inch, and we have observed 1/4 inch of rainfall we will skip.
If you want to keep your rain delay on we will indicate in the History what our weather intelligence would have done. You will see a notification in your history whether we would have skipped or not based on the available data. So this will give you a feel for what would have happened if you didn’t have the rain delay feature on.
One thing of note is that you don’t have to recreate watering times if you change the weather station. This will automatically come into effect, so just fyi.
Thanks Kevin - that is helpful to know how the system evaluates the conditions before initiating a sequence of watering.
As a follow up, I am using the weather station at Palomar Airport (KCRQ) which is about 12 miles away. I know that it rained pretty hard there Thursday and Friday - probably about an inch total (that is a lot for this area). I have my threshold set for 1/8 inch but wonder how far back in time the system looks to determine whether (or should I say weather) or not to run the watering sequence. We have prohibitions against watering for at least 48 hours of ANY measurable rain, so technically I could be in violation if I water on Sunday morning. We may need to have something smaller than 1/8 inch to ensure compliance.
Also, do you folks recommend certain makes or models of personal weather stations to install? I have an old one but it is not capable of connecting to the internet but would like to have a closer station than the one in Carlsbad as sometimes it will be cold and cloudy there but warm and sunny here.
Thanks for the reply. I would actually suggest utilizing IFTTT if you are wanting to have an automatic 48 hour delay if there is any rain. We have other California users that have used this. Pretty much you could create a recipe where if there is any rain detected in your area, the Iro would automatically generate a 48 hour rain delay. If you want me to help walk you through this I can.
We are working on some new features to help with these kinds of restrictions as they are becoming increasingly more important, especially for our California users.
We do recommend the Netatmo weather station with the rain gauge. This has the easiest integration with the Iro and provides everything that you would need. This article reviews integration with the Netatmo.
