Right now I am currently looking into adding an evapotranspiration estimate model to the plugin. Thank you to Freddan101 for raising up the issue.
While researching it looks like a lot of people are using evapotranspiration estimates to determine the water needs of their crops, plants and trees. Ideally you would take the total amount of rain and irrigation water in and balance the equation with the water needs determined by the evapotranspiration estimate. In the case of this plugin there is no way to balance the water in and water out equation completely since it does not know how much water is added by irrigation. What it can do is subtract away the precipitation lost due to evaporation and used by the plants.
So when it is humid and cool the evapotranspiration amount will be less so it will take longer for the total precipitation to fall below the threshold allowing more days between irrigation. Likewise when it is hot and dry the evapotranspiration amount will be greater so it will quickly subtract away from the total and drop below the threshold sooner so the irrigation can resume before it dries up.
The evapotranspiration estimate will also be applied to the forecast precipitation as well. If you think about time will elapse before that precipitation will fall but your plants will still be using water until it falls. By subtracting the amount of evapotranspiration for each day in the future it will balance the water in and water out equation.
The user will simply enter the crop coefficient which will adjust the amount of evapotranspiration for their grass or plants. There are plenty of coefficients already determined for most species and growing stages. For instance most grasses have a coefficient of 0.80 or 80% of the reference crop evapotranspiration. In theory the days in the past should be able to be set higher since the evapotranspiration model should be resetting the sensor and not the past number of days limit.
This is a great app and Blake has done a great job responding to PMs as well. Does anyone have an issue with updating the threshold value? I am trying to change it from the default of .13 to .2 and it keeps reverting back to .13. I have tried using the Save and Update button, modifying straight in the Advanced tab, and a few other combinations of the two. Any suggestions?
Two things you can try is first make sure you enter ā0.20ā and not just ā.2ā. It needs the leading zero. The second is close and reopen your browser. I have still had issues where my internet explorer seems to become unresponsive to the āSave & Updateā button. I added an extra parameter to the URL request to avoid caching but it does not appear to be that simple. I have noticed other plugins that have the same problem like the Variable Container plugins āSaveā button. Please let me know if either one of these does not fix your problem.
Good looking app. I apologise if this has been covered but is it possible to see the prediction in % for the day.
For example: make Lua code to sent prowl alert or something if prediction was above 70% rain.
Thank you
Rich
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk[/quote]
No apologies necessary. I went ahead and added PoP to the next release which should be 2.7. It will report the PoP for each day in a single variable delimited by commas. I added a lua code example to the original post on converting the past precipitation to lua table from the CSV string. You can simply substitute where appropriate to get the particular day you are interested. The PoP value will also appear on the data tab right above to the precipitation for each day.
The next release should be available in a week or two. I am also still working on adding evapotranspiration estimation. It looks like it should work out very nice once I polish it up. For instance we just got a good amount of rain here so in this case it will probably not reset the sensor for a week rather than after two or three days like I had it set before without accounting for evapotranspiration. It definitely makes it much more agile and intelligent in its decision making.
Probably a stupid question, but to use this with your irrigation system, you clearly need a controller that has a plug-in. Iām just about to pull the trigger, and want to use this with the setup. I live in the Seattle area, so this would be GREAT.
Iām curious what most of you are using with this? Iām leaning towards an Opensprinker over Etherrian or Irrigation Caddy. I really like the Rainmachine, but no plug-in yet.
[quote=ātomgru, post:48, topic:180668ā]Probably a stupid question, but to use this with your irrigation system, you clearly need a controller that has a plug-in. Iām just about to pull the trigger, and want to use this with the setup. I live in the Seattle area, so this would be GREAT.
Iām curious what most of you are using with this? Iām leaning towards an Opensprinker over Etherrian or Irrigation Caddy. I really like the Rainmachine, but no plug-in yet.[/quote]
There is a whole section on Veraās and irrigation. I suggest you search there first they talk about what works and any issues.
[quote=āinteglikewhoa, post:49, topic:180668ā][quote=ātomgru, post:48, topic:180668ā]Probably a stupid question, but to use this with your irrigation system, you clearly need a controller that has a plug-in. Iām just about to pull the trigger, and want to use this with the setup. I live in the Seattle area, so this would be GREAT.
Iām curious what most of you are using with this? Iām leaning towards an Opensprinker over Etherrian or Irrigation Caddy. I really like the Rainmachine, but no plug-in yet.[/quote]
There is a whole section on Veraās and irrigation. I suggest you search there first they talk about what works and any issues.
I have the RainMachineā¦ which I really like but integrated whether has no idea if it actually rained at my houseā¦ it uses AccuWhether which is great for area forecasts but not local. I wish it had a Vera plugin but they arenāt releasing the API.
I would go with something that has a Vera plug-in and better yet a WindowsPhone app!
That RainMachine looks nice. I actually did not know that there were already controllers out there using evapotranspiration to control water usage. I currently have a version of the Virtual Rain Sensor that I am testing that estimates the evapotranspiration each day and subtract it from the total precipitation, but the ultimate goal would be more integration with irrigation controllers to create a completely balanced equation of the water in and water out. The two ways I see to accomplish that would be to control the length of the irrigation(zone time) or the frequency of irrigation cycles(schedule).
Does anyone know how many controllers that integrate with the Vera will allow you to change the time of each zone? I am not familiar with all the different types of controllers and their plugins so I would appreciate any help. If the length of irrigations cannot be modified then you would be left with changing the frequency of irrigations.
Sorry I probably didnāt ask the right question. I wanted to know, of all the controllers that integrate with Vera, how many of the plugins allow you to modify the zone time within Vera? I assume most but I just was not sure since I have not personally researched it.
After thinking about it, I think I will make a second output that will supply the amount of irrigation needed. That way it could integrate with the zone time to make it variable as well. Right now it already does in a way affect the frequency of irrigations by bypassing when sufficient rain is detected. The irrigation needed will tell how much demand there is currently for water.
It would be calculated for the period of the irrigation cycle. The only flaw to this is without the sensor knowing how much and when irrigation is applied it is not possible to correct for any change or error in the forecast. This being a simple sensor I think I will try this basic approach now and implement a more complicated complete irrigation tracking approach later if needed.
I am making rain and soil sensors via the MySensors.org project. Iām going to use a soil sensor for each zone to ensure I only irrigate when/where needed. I live in Florida where we get 5 straight months on rain in the forecast but can go weeks without actual rain in a specific locale.
Have you looked were your getting your data from? Weather Underground doesnāt forecast for a large area (not the same as your local news station). As a matter of fact you can choose which station you use within blocks of your house. Stations range from private homeowners, business, airports, schools and more. If your setup on weather underground check and see your area and see where the information is coming from. My info is coming from a school with a 500.00 small weather package 1.5 blocks over. I also have an airport 1 mile south of me I can use.
Also you can use a Netatmo with rain gauge attachment if you want weather taken at your house.
Thank you for letting me know about the forecasts. I suppose I just need to accept irrigation amounts as an input and record it just like precipitation. That way even you could use it with the overpredicted forecast. During your first irrigation it would say the irrigation needed amount is small since rain is predicted, but then on your second irrigation days later if no rain has fallen it will correct for that and you will need to irrigate extra to make up for that. The only way to accomplish that is to get feedback about how much and what time the irrigation is applied.
So does this sound useful or practical to anyone? It kind of goes away from the idea of just a rain sensor since it would also record irrigation that you manually report to it. The advantage of it would be that you could integrate your zone timer to be variable and have a completely need based irrigation system like the RainMachine and others like it. The RainMachine by the way does not track precipitation as far as I could tell. It looks like it only detects a rain event in the general area and suspends irrigation for a set number of days.
Hopefully the soil moisture method will work out ok but for me I would worry about the accuracy and just the upkeep of it.
I am in the final stages of development, having the mechanism done and now working on the sketch.
For now, it will create a RAIN and a MOTION device to record rain and indicate precipitation. If you want to look at that, Iād appreciate any comments.
I asked @blakem some questions regarding his plugin, it would be nice to develop a single device, like he so elegantly did hereā¦
I want to get the physical device working first, though.
PS Iām in FLA too, same issueā¦ it rains a lot, a quarter of a mile away!
very cool little deviceā¦ do you have it all working yet? I could imagine having the moisture sensor attached to this rain gauge so it not only measures the amount of rain (or irrigation) but also the actual soil moisture.
Iām planning on making my sensors solar powered but that is still just a thought at this point.
Yes, but on a breadboard. I have the hall effect sensor working, so it all needs to get mounted into the pipe housing.
Iāll be doing that next week, so Iāll update the photos as I go .Iāll add in the moisture sensor to the sketch, I think that is a great idea.
The issue at this point is getting the sketch finished.
I am struggling right now with the rain device (RainSensor1) not workingā¦ I hope I can get some assistance from @lolodomo. You can see when I include that sensor in my sketch, it glitches out the plugin. I checked the plugin table that calls these devices, and that looks OK. I donāt have the skills to get into the xml and json files that are posted here.
I was just asking specifically if there was one that seemed to work any better with the virtual rain sensor.