Irrigation Module

[hart2hart]

My water bill has been too high last couple years and I want to take advantage of the irrigation module this year. The problem is that Middle Tennessee weather is dominated by pop-up storms during the summer months so you can have 3 inches of rain in one spot and none in an area 1/4 mile away.

 

The closet WeatherBug stations to my house are over 5 miles away -- meaning for rainfall they would be worthless ion many occasions. What are all the variables the irrigation module needs to be accurate and could rainfall be entered/obtained from another very local source? ....even if I had a gauge that required me to read and enter the data by hand or if very lucky found some electronic rain sensor that could measure, transmit, and dump daily.

 

If this is not possible are there other suggestions to get benefit of such well thought out irrigation logic?

[Mark H]

Don't want to hijack, but I'm interested in knowing the answer to your question as well. (I have an (old-ish) Davis weather station which has software that gathers all data via Davis' "Wireless Weather Envoy". I'd love a way to get that data straight into the ISY, even manually.)

[Michel Kohanim]

Hello hart2hart and TheSidewinder,

 

We are working on a solution whereby you can feed ISY climate information.

 

With kind regards,

Michel

[arw01]

It's been on the todo list for a while, and if not mistaken, part of the two way network communications they want to implement. It's been on there for a good long while, pushed back by the I2C that insteon broke so many things with, and then the z-wave modules and programming to support them.

 

Personally, I would figure it will come too late this season, there has been little talk of version 5 or whatever jump they will make with the two way communications. Perhaps a simple rain sensor to an io linc. There was some logic, perhaps even here, where a user looked at the rain sensor, did a little adding and substracting based on morning and evening reading, and made his own "system" up of when to water.

 

There are a number of soil moisture sensors out there too, might be worth using a rasperry pi, some sort of middle software for a while and just fill in some spots in the variables with that using custom rest calls.

 

Alan

[hart2hart]

Hello hart2hart and TheSidewinder,

 

We are working on a solution whereby you can feed ISY climate information.

 

With kind regards,

Michel

 

Thanks.

[Waketech]

Interested if anything has been implemented on this yet ?

[MWareman]

Interested as well. Holding off the purchase of a weather solution at the moment to see what happens with this, HAM, pwsweather etc. However, I would prefer to keep it local and not depend on an Internet connection for anything other than forecast data.

[Waketech]

All,
 
Need some help on the following.  After I ran my sprinkler based on the irrigation requirement being exceeded and my program resetting the IR requirment I still had a non-zero number.  My log looked something like this.
 

Thu 07/10/2014 12:00:49 AM : [MOD  2  2  1 23] 148129.000000  Weather - Irrigation Requireme = 14.8129 mm

 

Sprinkler sequence started at approx 6:00 am

 

Sprnkler system stopped and IR rest at approx 9:50 am

 

Thu 07/10/2014 09:50:18 AM : [MOD  2  2  1 23] 46529.000000  Weather - Irrigation Requireme = 4.6529 mm

 

Should this have not been set to zero ?

[IndyMike]

Hello Waketech,

 

The amount of water "deducted" from the irrigation required depends on the values you specified for "absorption factor" and "water applied per irrigation"

 

In the expample below I specified 80% for absorption and .42" for water applied.  When I execute the "irrigation complete" command, the ISY subtracts 0.336" (.42" X 0. from the irrigation required value.