I am getting an irrigation system installed in the garden and obviously I want it smart and integrated with home assistant.
It is going to have 8 irrigation zones / solenoid valves. I have an Ecowitt rain sensor as well as multiple soil moisture sensors for different parts / zones of the garden.
The property is in Tuscany, where water in summer is extremely scarce. This is why I want the soil sensors (instead of just simple timers) to make I sure use just enought water, but not any more than that. Logic-wise this seems simple enought to me, but apparently this a rather unconventional approach and not something that controllers / software support out of the box?
The features I am looking for:
Stop irrigation if rain is detected
Skip irrigation if rain is forcast.
Irrigate zone until a specific value of the respective soil sensor is reached
Support a soil moisture sensor for a group of zones: Irrigate first zone until a certain moisture is reached, then repeat the same irrigation time for the other zones in that group. (this is for the lawn that is split in to multiple zones but only has one sensor)
Adjust target soil moisture if a float sensor in the well is activated (basically a survival mode for periods of drought where I would irrigate just enough for plants not to die)
I am quite confused about how to approach this hardware as well as software wise:
Is there any reason to buy a dedicated sprinkler controller over just using a bunch of e.g. Shellys to switch the valves? A dedicated controller just seams like an unneeded, additional layer of potential complications - or am I missing something here?
There are different custom components available in HACS, however most of them look really complicated and don’t seem to be UI-based. I am not a coder, so a purely YAML-based integration is not ideal. I found the IrrigationProgram Custom Component that looks reasonably user friendly. However I am not sure if that one supports soil moisture in general and/or per zone.
I am a Node-Red guy. Should I just forego any custom component and try building the whole thing in NR?
One thing you want to keep in mind is that you want this setup to be reliable - and that’s the main reason I went with a Rachio irrigation controller (not sure, if that’s available in Italy, though).
You want to ensure that, especially when you want/need to be at the edge of the watering needs, it doesn’t miss a day or more.
I’m sure there are different brands that do the same or something similar, and you can probably replicate it with Node Red as well, but here’s what the system does out of the box:
You can define per zone what kind of soil and what kind of plants you have.
You can tie a binary rain sensor into the device itself that knows, if it’s raining (or if it recently rained).
You can connect your own or a nearby weather station into the setup for current, recent, and forecast rain.
The system can be set up to automatically adjust irrigation time up & down based on the season.
AFAIK, you can NOT directly connect moisture sensors into the system itself, but they could feed back into e.g. HA (and turn irrigation cycles/zones off via the HA integration) if necessary.
Altogether, this allows some smart irrigation management on the console side with notifications like
“The next watering event will be skipped because the soil has still enough moisture!”
or
“The next watering event will be skipped because there is 5mm of rain in the forecast within the next 24h!”
Keep in mind that the ‘skipping’ events are solely based on calculations determined on the inputs from 1. - 4.
Water here in Arizona is scarce as well, but I still prefer to (slightly?) over-water than (sightly?) under-water - given that replacing dead plants, especially nice and old ones, costs a lot more than a few liters of water.
I also want to make sure that me working on HA automations, scripts, restarts, or reboots do not impact the irrigation schedules - I tinker with my HA setup in timeslots after working hours which, especially in the summer, seem to often coincide with the irrigation times.
Hm, yes. Reliability indeed is a good argument for a dedicated controller. As much as we all love HA, betting the wellbeing of your entire garden on its reliability would be optimistic.
The Idea of having an externally set shedule for watering that then can be cancelled by a HA-event instead of relying on HA to maintain a schedule in the first place is a good idea.
I have looked at the Rachio in the past. It is by far the one controller i like most, but unfortunately it is still not sold outside the US/Canada.
The irrigation-guy has proposed a Rain Bird ESP-TM2. While that thing looks like it was designed in the 80ties, there is actually a wifi module for it. Also there is a Rain Bird Integration, but from the explanations i’m not quite sure how much one can actually control through it.
This goes way beyond to what I need but my 2cts… make sure it covers any impact on negative effects. Examples…
I had a simple on/off valve of which the battery/connection died whilst being ‘open’ and whilst not at home, this kept being open for 3 days…not concerned about the water cost but the plants were wasted.
Other thing: one of the in-ground pipes burst and flooded the area, this was not visible easily and there was no check on deviations on liters/hour used. The valve just switched on/off like normal, this was an impact of just water being wasted.
Again…just a very basic user in this area but …my 2ct as mentioned
Yes, i have taken several measures against the odds. The irrigation is remote from my primary home, so it has to work in case of failures.
Power supply is guarded by a Shelly 1pm as switch and energy meter to measure current flow when the valves are switched on. A missing current increase sends a notification via telegram. The flow of water of measured by flow meters.
To prevent flooding the relays are switch off after some configured time, if HA would be unavailable after the start of the watering cycle.
All relays are switched off on restart by default.
The controller is a ESP32 running ESPHome and connected via Wifi to HA.
All updates to the system are only made when i am present in Spain and tested before.
Ah, your solution is interesting. My situation is very much the same. I am also not living there, so the system has to run unsupervised for weeks or even months at a time.
Since I wanted to avoid DIY’ing the hardware i was looking to have the pressure pump on a Shelly Pro 1PM (So I can see its actually working by looking at the consumption) but the idea to check the valves as well is good. For the valve control I was thinking of just using three Shelly Pro 3, with a 24vac transformer hooked up to the dry contacts. All of that sitting on a DIN-rail gives a nice and simple set-up.
Shellys should work as well. You might consider using two Shelly Pro 4PM to get the measurement also. I’m also using a 24vac transformer for the valves mounted on the DIN rail.
The 4 PM does not have dry contacts, it can only output grid voltage, so i’d need a seperate transformer for each valve, thats a bit overkill. But since i will have the well pump on a Pro 1PM i’ll get feedback on whether or not the valve correctly operates correctly by the power reading of the pump. Also there are surveillance cams, so I can actually see if the sprinklers are working or not.
What I’d be interested to know: What flow meters are you using?