Yup, my mom lives down near Kissimmee. I’m here in beautiful and expensive Long Island. Our aquifer on the barrier island where I live is deep in the ground, so only city supplied water (plus I don’t think we are allowed?). And if we could, I’m sure it would cost a fortune to dig a well on our small property.
Hmm, didn’t realize they were that expensive… Was hoping it was the lesser of the two evils…
No, never heard of that. I guess I’d have to get electrical somehow to the shutoff valve/water meter pit in my front yard?
Whoa… just did a quick google… these suckers ain’t cheap! Between that and the ongoing cost of electrical to run it, it might be cheaper long term to tear up the street.[/quote]
Regarding the topic of the subject line: “Best irrigation controller for HA integration”:
Pretty disappointed with my OpenSprinkler and the MCV plug-in as neither provide an easy way to create programs that provide flexibiltiy with easily modifiable zone watering times spread over days-of-week. This product is for the not faint-of-heart when it comes to understanding, applying and using technologically complex products. This seems to be true with MCV and and many of the Z-Wave products that lack sufficient documentation. I don’t have any exposure to other irrigation controllers, so I’m unsure about their capabilities.
Thankfully, I am personally comfortable with most of this sort of thing, but would like a low time investment solution to all Z-wave HA. I will say, the PLEG and PLTS plug-ins are great contributrions to simplifying complex tasks done with UI5 – thank you Richard Schafer. Best $5 I ever spent!!
@dcarrington - I don’t own one yet, but can’t you simply program the OS through it’s own web interface? My only interest in interfacing with Vera would be to prevent a watering session if say the WU plugin predicted rain, or I set a party scene so that the sprinklers didn’t come on.
@TC1 is right… and it works great. Also, once you set it up, you are done, especially if you are using the WU plugin. Admittedly, you kind of have to futz thru the OS ux a bit, but I didn’t find that very hard, and the graphic view of hoe you set your zones up is great.
TC1, tomgru - what I wish the OpenSprinkler web interface provided is the ability to apply different zone watering times within each scheduled watering program.
The way the OpenSprinkler web interface now works is as follows: if I want to have zones 1 & 6 sprinklers on for 7 minutes, zones 2 & 3 on for 10 minutes, zone 4 on for 15 minutes, and zone 5 on for 4 minutes, I would need to enter four different programs all with the same start time but with duration times of 7, 10, 15, and 4 minutes. Also required is to set the interval for a large value so the programs don’t repeat during a 24 hour time period.
Obviously it is possible to have different zone watering times, but programming for that isn’t, in my opinion, very straighforward.
I haven’t had OS very long, but it does seem reliable. Rayshobby has done a great job with the hardware and the enclosure – very professionally done. The web interface is a bit unstable and occasionally asks for a password even though I’ve disabled the password requirement. To get past this, I simply refresh the browser by doing a control-F5 (Windows 7). I’m guessing because OS is “open” we’ll see some worthwhile user contributed improvements, and this is a potential big plus for OpenSprinkler.
Would it be easier to do that timing on Vera? I have a similar need. I just assumed when I bought OS that the more complicated timings would be on Vera. But now you have me thinking about the details on implementation. I only have four grass zones, all with different run times. My drip zones are complicated and weather related. I assumed I would do the drip zones as scenes.
Is the MCV plugin updated to the latest OS firmware? Is the plugin developer still active?
I don’t need a master valve, but after reading these threads, I think I will install one. A master value will allow me to have an easy active/inactive indicator.
I was a bit disappointed with this as well. My system is fairly simple and I would like to run one program with different watering times for each zone. There is an alternate program for the OSPi that has this feature, but I doubt it will work with the Vera plug-in.
Yes, agreed - the web and Android app is a bit rough. However this being an automation forum, the API is extremely simple and very easy to integrate using LUA (I don’t use the plugin as it limits me).
Hello,
There is new public API for RainMachine.
Documentation is “work in progress” here:
For now, only functions marked with “hardware version 1” would work.
Thank you,
Dragos
Well, I guess they heard the complaints about the programming. I just got a new OpenSprinkler and the UI allows different times for each zone within a program. I’ve been using a Rain8 X10 for about 12 years and just converted to OS so I could integrate it better and more reliably into my HA. There is one feature of the Rain8 I kinda miss. It had the ability to store a drop dead timeout for each zone so that if for whatever reason a zone got turned on manually (accidentally hit a button on a remote, butt dialing the sprinklers, weird X10 power line crap, etc.) the zone would never run more than the drop dead time and it would shut it off. So far I don’t see that functionality in OS.
The developer of OS seems to be improving the product all the time, I’m sure an email with the suggestion would actually make it’s way into production…