I have a condo in the California desert, in a gated community with about 300 units. The HOA water bill runs about $50K annually. I estimate $40K for irrigation (the rest mostly refills swimming pools and fountains). If we could expect to save at least $10K, I’d propose a Rachio-based system to the board.
The present system consists of ~100 dumb timers. The gardeners set them to water every 2 days in the summer, then reset them to run every 4 days for the rest of the year. Watering starts in the evening (political; homeowners complain if they don’t see the grass being watered).
There’s only about 5 in. of rain annually (mostly in the winter), but we water year round so rain skips would still offer some saving, but I’m hoping that most would come from tracking actual temperatures and adjusting times / frequencies accordingly.
We have a fairly large HOA setup in Nevada (350+) controllers. The real issue is WiFi connectivity (ubiquitous) and if they do fall off for some WiFi router change (or other?) who ultimately owns this process and maintains the controllers. I wouldn’t underestimate the ownership/management aspects.
This could be handled by a couple schedules, if only we had the “year” removed from schedule end dates it would be fully automated.
Definitely. Weather intelligence skips would be far better than what is in place now. The lack of precipitation in Palm Springs does have me questioning how much savings you would actually be getting.
You would only get this with flex daily schedules (if you wanted dynamic frequencies) and I wouldn’t recommended this for ~100 mostly unattended controllers. It’s manageable at the individual level, but I don’t think ready for prime time at the level of autonomy I believe you seek.
At first glance it seems like an ambitious project. If you had dedicated internet for all the controllers (all the controllers on the same Internet) and stuck with automated, but fixed schedule changes it could be worth the long term investment, if only to save on weather intelligence skips and gardener costs (I don’t know how much they charge to manually adjust 100+ controllers twice a year).
