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Using Predicted future moisture level with scheduling restrictions?

#1

I have seen requests for adding better support for watering restrictions for flex schedules in other threads. It looks like flex and water as needed scheduling will water today if the current moisture level is below the allowed depletion level. This works well if the schedule can run any day. However, in the case of 2 watering days per week (say Monday and Thursday), I think the trigger for watering a zone on Monday would be to water if the zone will be depleted to ‘wilt’ level by Thursday (the next available watering day on the schedule) if the Monday watering is skipped.

Sounds easy in theory, but you would need to work out whether to rely on predicted weather forecast data to calculate predicted precipitation and evapotranspiration, or merge the weather forecast with historical data. You might want to have a threshold like the weather intelligence feature for including predicted rainfall. Of course, the further out in the future, the less reliable the weather forecast.

Has this approach been considered yet?

#2

This is actually how flex works today. It looks to the future of your next watering date and determines if it can wait to water until your next restriction day. In general, I think its an imperfect way to water since I bet most of the time it is going to want to water since it has to wait so long (especially with two days), but that’s only a guess. Restrictions in general are tough.

Hope this helps.

:cheers:

#3

Thanks for the quick response.

Two more questions - 1. Does this also apply to the new scheduling with water as needed? 2. Is the predicted future moisture level used in the scheduling the same level that is displayed in the graphs for each zone?

I am thinking that the default allowed depletion of 50% could be increased (to allow for more depletion) when there are watering restrictions imposed, especially for lawns.

#4

Yes, we use a similar concept called climate skip.

Yes.

:cheers: