Automation - Irrigation, Moisture, Feeding, Mosquitos and how Home Assistant pulled it all together

[TAGMDL (Tom Grounds)]

This is a more in-depth post the combines the efforts we put into the irrigation system and how Home Assistant pulls it all together. In this post I cover how our outside area has morphed into the zones that we established, how we automated the watering process for each of the zones, adding the ability to fertilize the zones, leveraging the irrigation system as a method to manage mosquitos and adding soil moisture devices to help automate watering when the ‘smart watering’ of the timers isn’t as smart as it thinks! It also includes a couple automations that become possible along with some dashboards.

Home Assistant is a really powerful platform to make managing outside spaces so much easier!

Here is a link to my posting in my blog: Automation - Irrigation, Moisture, Feeding & Mosquitos (tagmdl.com)

Here is the link to the Technical Overview for our smart home: Technical Overview (tagmdl.com)

[Markus99 (Mark)]

Good stuff! I don’t get quite as involved, and use different sensors - but do display the moisture for some of our outside plants with a colored guage card. Makes seeing if it’s over/under watered pretty simple:

        - type: gauge
          card_mod:
            style: |
              ha-card {
                vertical-align: middle !important;
                padding: 5px 6% 2px 6% !important;
              }
          entity: sensor.miflora_2_moisture
          name: ''
          needle: true
          unit: '%'
          min: 0
          max: 100
          segments:
            - from: 0
              color: '#f79a29'
            - from: 15
              color: '#41b552'
            - from: 25
              color: '#25952d'
            - from: 50
              color: '#41b552'
            - from: 60
              color: '#f79a29'

[TAGMDL (Tom Grounds)]

That’s an awesome card! I need to add it to my dashboard!

[dproffer (David Proffer)]

Interesting post, thanks! Your experiences with mosquito abatement is very interesting as we head into the summer months here in SoCal after a wet and long winter.

On the drip irrigation setup, I went with the LinkTap hardware. I am not sure if it will be a good solution as yet. A bit spendy, however I like the ‘all local’ control option via MQTT. Their cloud services are working fine so far for ‘the boss’, but I like the ability to continue to use (in theory) if they go belly up.

Wireless Watering System - LinkTap

[TAGMDL (Tom Grounds)]

Here is a modified version of your moisture meter adjusting to my automation 20% trigger. Thanks for sharing!!

[TAGMDL (Tom Grounds)]

Thanks for sharing! I waffle between wanting all on-site vs cloud. What I like about the B-Hyve is that the weather and configuration appear to be what is stored in the cloud and give access when I’m not home. The turning on and control is all in the devices on premise.

Price wise the two are comparable. The B-Hyve is roughly $60 per zone and the Link Tap is one device for 4 zones. It looks like a solid option if your zones are in multiples of 4.

[tenolan]

Great implementation! I started playing around with a very similar setup with ecowitt wh51 and I am struggling to get to work the automation, for some kind of reason the trigger is not working. Would be possible to share your configuration for the automation? Would help me a ton and will be really appreciated. Thx in advance.

[tenolan]

Also the moisture measure would be a great addition

[TAGMDL (Tom Grounds)]

Happy to walk through it. I’ll focus on my Bamboo planters for this walk-through.

I use the Orbit BHyve integration for my sprinkler control. I have one unit that controls the sprinklers in the 6 bamboo planters.

I have 3 ecowitt hubs to cover the number of sensors I needed (ok, wanted) in my setup. I’m using the GW2000B.

Across the hubs I have these 6 Bamboo sensors. I found that the names didn’t come across from the ecowitt app on my phone, so I used the App as a basis to update the entities in Home Assistant. You can see the Bamboo sensors updated here - if you look at the entity ID you see the actual id in the phone app:

I built a dashboard specifically for irrigation including Accuweather weather forecast, the BHyve control entities and then a dial graph for each of the moisture sensors. I built the dashboard first to ensure I had all of the correct entities aligned with the devices that I have.

The top card has the sprinkler information - including the ON/OFF for the automation that I have built. These first 5 entities are from the BHyve controller including whether the device is on a rain delay due to upcoming weather, etc. The last one is the on/off for the automation.

I also include a history item showing the history of watering:

The graphs for each moisture dial:

I did research on the plants to identify the ideal moisture which is 20%-40% moisture - so I set that to green on the dial. You can see the breakdown from 0 - 19, 20-39, 40-59, and 60 and above on a scale from 0 - 100. Identifying the ideal moisture is what informed my automation that if I was below 20% moisture then to turn on the sprinklers.

You also see the sensor that I’m using to display the value. This is the sensor I use in the automation.

Automation:
I have 5 automations that I use for my irrigation control:

The Bamboo automation is structured as follows:

When: I have this automation trigger at 8AM each morning. The significance of this is that each of my zones all have a different time that they turn on - so I use that time as my trigger time each day.

And if:
I use the Accuweather condition of Cloudy, Partly Cloudy and Sunny (because I don’t want this watering if it happens to be raining)

I have a second condition which is ‘if any of the 6 conditions match’ for the 6 moisture sensors in my bamboo planters:

I verified that the entity is the same one I use in my dashboard so that I know I have the correct one selected.

Then do:

This turns on the sprinkler.

It has worked really well for me. Let me know if this helps!