Longer Intervals for Watering Frequency
Gathering Feedback
I just planted an area of drought tolerant landscape. After this winter, it will get watered once a week next summer. The summer after than every two weeks and then the years after that once month. How about adding those longer intervals? Should be pretty easy and would save a lot of manual work.
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Same issue here. Just setup a drip system covering a cactus garden under an overhang (which won't get any natural rain, but needs very infrequent watering). Watering once every 14 days is way too often. Why isn't this just a text entry field, rather than a popup that needs to have options populated for every supported interval?
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The current beta allows to activate "Adaptive Frequency" on programs, which might help in this case (program won't irrigate if soil still has moisture for plant root depth).
Also in the beta we have a minimum watering timer per zone setting this to a higher value can skip unneeded cycles.
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Why can there not be an option for simply watering once a month, or once every other month? Like others above, my watering needs are not so frequent and I don't want to have to micro-manage and use complex calculations such as what you suggest above. One of the reasons I got this controller is because the manual ones forced me to schedule at a minimum 1X weekly watering. I am trying to save water without having to do everything manually! This is very frustrating.
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Would be nice to be able to water once every 2, 3, or 4 weeks. Some plants don't need weekly watering (for example, mature trees or desert plants). Would think this would not be difficult to add to the software at all. Another way to make Rainmachine stand out as better than competitors.
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Hi, all
In order to achieve this kind of program frequency you can use the IFTTT smart applets.
What you need to do is:
- make sure you have a valid RainMachine Remote Access account enabled for your RainMachine device
- sing up for a STANDARD FREE account on ifttt.com
- link the RainMachine IFTTT service
- create your fist IFTTT applet
- for the IF action choose Date & Time IFTTT service
- select the Every month on the... trigger
- choose the day of the month and start hour:minute
- for the THEN action choose RainMachine IFTTT service
- select your Start a program trigger
- choose the desired program from the list corresponding to your RainMachine device
- save the Applet
Now, every month on that date and on that particular time of the day, the IFTTT applet will run and your program will start.
If there are any other watering activities currently running on your RainMachine on that day/time, then the program will be automatically added to the watering queue and will start accordingly. IFTTT applets actions will be considered as Manual Watering into your Watering History.Hope that helps for now.
Thank you.
Julian
RainMachine Support
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This is nice, but some of us are not tech savvy and would like to have this as an option from the regular user interface.
Saving water is becoming even more important in the era of climate change and ever increasing water restrictions and water bills.
Please add this - surely it must not be that difficult to include.
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No. It is not so simple as you say and I will not get into the details now. Rest assured our developers know about it and as I said, we will try to implement this, and test it before release. If it hasn't been implemented by now is because our community low requests of this feature.
Since the RainMachines are Smart Wi-Fi Irrigations controllers, there is a way to get this done right now, if you are using a remote access account to control your RainMachine device remotely.Thank you for your understanding and patience.
Julian
RainMachine Support -
Without knowing how the software is designed, it's illogical for an outsider to decide how easy or complex a software change request is to implement. In addition to wanting this feature, I also want rainmachine to charge me an annual software subscription fee. Say, $25? Then I'd be funding development. Without a fee, I'm just begging for something I've already purchased to magically get better.
Consider a (non-Tesla) car. Why doesn't the cruise control improve overnight? Because the car maker needs to invest in new car features that people will buy. Selling new hardware is the only way they can stay in business without a subscription model.
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Perhaps RainMachine could have a basic platform and an enhanced platform for either a one-time upgrade or annual fee. I would be fine with this.
I am not a software programmer and do not know how RainMachine is designed but if the difficulty of allowing monthly watering arises from having a week-based program, perhaps the problem could be solved by adding a "weeks between watering" counter.
For example, I set the weekly program to water my trees for 30 minutes on Tuesday and Wednesday and set the "weeks between watering" counter to "4". During weeks 1-3 the week-based program is suspended as if paused; in week 4 the program becomes active and waters the trees for 30 minutes on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then the counter is reset and the cycle begins anew.
I do not know but perhaps an approach like adding a weekly counter would simplify things and accomplish monthly watering without requiring any major redesign of the software .
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