Water restrictions

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Rob Ram

September 16, 2017 22:33

 My current sprinkler timer will permit time and day water restrictions. However the time is lost on power outage. I must manually set year, month, day and time of day. However the program is preserved. I would like to get a new timer, one that will set the time and day over WiFi. I need to:

1 Set watering day restrictions. I cannot use Monday, Tuesday, Thurday, Friday, Sunday. Only permitted days are Wednesday and Saturday between the hours of  before 8AM and after 5 PM PM.

2. Obviously, weather data to optimize watering is almost useless. However, a rain sensor to prevent watering during rain will help.

3. The lawn sprinkler must not be an IED (internet enabled device), use the cloud or depend on an internet connection for daily use).

I planned to make my own timer with a Rasbury PI board and custom programming. The board has WiFi, either-net, USB and a GPIO port. This will provide A/D and D/A input output ports, useful for analog sensors. Then I saw the rainmachine. Is it worth changing my plan?

Location is South East Florida.

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  RainMachine Support September 19, 2017 05:11 (Edited September 19, 2017 05:14)

  Hi, Rob
  Yes, it's worth it. Our RainMachine devices do all those requests you have:
  - you can set watering restrictions (when not to water) by Months, Days and Hours of the day.
  - you can choose to activate different free weather services like NOAA, WUnderground, DarkSky (former Forecast.io), NetAtmo or your own personal weather station. Also, you can attach a hardware rain sensor that will automatically stop all watering activities when senses rain.
  - our RainMachine devices are cloud independent by design and do not rely on a cloud connectivity in order to work and they do not lose any settings or information you may have on the device if the internet connection is not available. If there is a power outage when a watering activity is ON, that watering activity will be stopped and when the RainMachine reboots when power is back on the other scheduled activities will start as programmed. Also, you can access the RainMachine device remotely without the need of binding it with our cloud servers (we only need your email address that has to be validated with our servers) by allowing the local RainMachine IP port through your router.
  
  Thank you for your interest, Rob
  Hope this helps.
  RainMachine Support

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