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General Lawn and Garden Irrigation / Re: Automatic adjusting schedules?

« Last post by Jim on December 23, 2014, 02:48:16 pm »

Hello PollieXmas,

Thanks for your comment. Here's a response:

>>The way I used EtherRain is to set my schedule to only water Even days. My understanding is that when the schedule is set to skip irrigation when it is raining or based on the forecast, I might end up irrigating daily if it ends up raining on odd days :-)

An irrigation program can be delayed up to 24 hours AFTER rain if you have selected a weather station that has a raingauge. The rainfall information is stored for a day by LawnCheck and used to determine if the cycle should run. If yesterday's or today's rain amount exceeds the threshold that you set then your cycle will not run today, even if there is no rain today. If a cycle is blocked the reason for the block will be shown in the log.

Our weather help page describes how irrigation block decisions are made: LawnCheck Weather Setup and Decision Process page. See the section at the bottom of this page regarding rain gauge blocks.

This should allay your fears.

Jim

General Lawn and Garden Irrigation / Re: Potential improvements for more efficient watering?

« Last post by Jim on December 23, 2014, 02:29:12 pm »

Hello djrobx,
The type of irrigation that you are referring to is called Evapotranspiration (ET). The system you are referring to that is run by CIMIS in California provides the needed information to run Evapotranspiration type cycles.

While the ET based systems are theoretically the most optimized form of irrigation, in practice they are difficult to implement and don't always provide optimization. Example: ET was designed for agriculture to provide growers with irrigation information for optimizing their crop yield. The formula takes weather elements and crop type into account. The method is based on assumptions that hold for agricultural irrigation environments but don't hold for most residential irrigation installations. That is: 1. the "crop" is constant; 2. The irrigation area is uniform. In residential irrigation, there are many "crops" - lawn, garden, trees, shrubs. In residential irrigation the irrigation area is not uniform: tree and building shadows, different soils.

The basic assumptions upon which ET is based for agriculture are not valid for residential - in most cases and so this form of irrigation isn't as optimal as some would have you believe. To make ET work you need additional information: inches of water applied per minute or hour; and a good weather station with a rain gauge. Also, the CIMIS system doesn't account for microclimates so you have to make adjustments to the formula.

In residential use ET is complicated, requires additional information that many installations don't have, and requires adjustments. Our monthly setback function is an ET estimation. It is a simple number system that most can apply. It is a method recommended for use by the water utilities in Southern California who publish a monthly setback number on their website. It is a practical form of optimization.

With that said we are looking into how to use the CIMIS data within California for full ET based cycles.

Jim

Feature Requests / Re: "chain" two devices together

« Last post by pohoda on December 23, 2014, 01:52:32 pm »

This would be a great feature. It is cumbersome trying to adjust multiple zones so that they do not overlap. Also when pausing it would be great to be able to do it once for both controller.

Feature Requests / Re: Support for YR.no

« Last post by Jim on December 23, 2014, 09:45:56 am »

Hello Paul,
Thank you for your request. I haven't heard of YR.No - I'll look into it and see what they offer.

For forecast using PoP with WeatherUnderground I would recommend using a high PoP threshold if it is important that your greenscape receives water. Using PoP as a control is a forecast method designed to reduce unnecessary irrigation and because it is a forecast it won't be 100%. WeatherUnderground uses NOAA for forecasting they don't have a proprietary forecast algorithm. For Northern California the PoP forecast has been accurate, however I'd recommend a threshold of 60% or above.

Jim

Feature Requests / Support for YR.no

« Last post by PollieXmas on December 23, 2014, 05:51:06 am »

Hi,

I know that you probably get this a lot, but I would love support for YR.No for weather forecasting. My reasons are as follows;

1) They provide more granular predictions based on your area. For example, rain forecasts are different for different areas in the same city. So with WU I suspect that a schedule will be skipped based on a forecast even though I did not get any rain.
2) They are super accurate! If they say it will start raining and 3 and stop at 5 you bet that is what is going to happen.
3) They provide hourly forecasts and continually adjust forecasts. (Not sure this will affect anything.)
4) I suspect their international coverage would be a bit better.

Thanks for reading and considering the proposal.

Regards

Paul

Feature Requests / Auto adjust the start times

« Last post by PollieXmas on December 23, 2014, 05:36:23 am »

Hi,

Would it be possible to also adjust the start time based on the irrigation % indicator?

I like to water my garden just after sunrise. Chances are that I'll be awake and can check on faulty sprinklers before it becomes an issue.

Being able to use the percentage compensation to also adjust the start time could work. Alternatively simply adjusting the start time based on the sunrise offset would probably more accurate and user-friendly.

Thanks

Paul

New Questions, Ask Your Questions Here / Re: Metric measurements

« Last post by PollieXmas on December 23, 2014, 05:30:04 am »

+1 on having a matric option please

General Lawn and Garden Irrigation / Automatic adjusting schedules?

« Last post by PollieXmas on December 23, 2014, 05:27:53 am »

Hi,

Before connecting my Etherain, I used to water my roses every second day. When it rains, I would wait for one day and then start watering it manually every second day.

The way I used EtherRain is to set my schedule to only water Even days. My understanding is that when the schedule is set to skip irrigation when it is raining or based on the forecast, I might end up irrigating daily if it ends up raining on odd days :-)

What would have been good it the schedule could flip between odd and even days based on rainfall the previous day.

If it sounds like a good idea, can it please be added to the development backlog :-)

Regards

Paul

General Lawn and Garden Irrigation / Potential improvements for more efficient watering?

« Last post by djrobx on August 01, 2014, 09:42:42 am »

California is currently in a very bad drought. While the EtherRain has been helpful in making scheduling easy, I feel its weather-specific features to optimize watering is very lacking. At best I can control the amount of water on a month to month basis, and I'm limited to a single upper temperature for "hot days" to trigger additional watering.

Our local newspaper had an article about coming water restrictions, and I was surprised to see the first comment was an insightful post about using CIMIS (California Irrigation Management Information System) to calculate the amount of water required to replenish his lawn based on the evaporation from previous day(s). It has a RESTFUL web API that will report the amount of evaporation (in inches). You can use this to calculate the amount of inches of water you need to replace when you irrigate. You can place a cup on the lawn to figure out how many inches per minute your irrigation system outputs.

It seems like this is exactly what's missing. Using weather underground or yahoo to forecast precipitation is great, but some intelligence around how much watering is actually needed could result in additional water savings. We have mild weeks, hot dry weeks, and hot humid weeks. A smart controller should adapt.

New Questions, Ask Your Questions Here / Re: how do I schedule an irrigation interval?

« Last post by Jim on December 03, 2013, 08:50:47 pm »

I just posted this on another topic but wanted to re-post it here because it is relevant to this discussion:
--------------------
To my knowledge there isn't a way to run a cycle on every 3rd day. The reason we didn't implement every N day on LawnCheck because most people want to know which days of the week their sprinklers will run - especially during mowing season.

You can more closely estimate an every-third-day schedule using two programs: set one program to run on a 3/4 schedule, for example Monday and Thursday, and then create another program to run once a week, for example on Saturday. You can scale back the irrigation times on the Saturday programs as needed. This will give you a 3/2/2 schedule

Also, in many climates a lawncare pro will recommend a 3/4 schedule instead of a 3/2/2 - with longer irrigation times - this gives the water a chance to soak in. In some very hot climate this might not work. LawnCheck gives you 5 independent programs per controller with monthly controller on each, so in hot climate you might want to add a few "summer-only" programs.

Jim