Hi all, I know there is several posts about irrigation but I never really found out why my original automation wasn’t the best way to go about it. I currently have Irrigation Unlimited running well, when I first decided to automate my irrigation I started off by simply executing 6 sequences (6 stations) in order with delays and pauses between stations and it seemed to work fine. I cant seem to find the posts where I saw that people were saying its not the best method because the stations may not switch off and you could flood your property. Can someone please explain why that is the case? couldn’t that be the case even with the ones purposely built for irrigation.
I want to to have something simple that I can either start the complete 6 station cycle or manually, automatically or select individual stations to water. Is there a way to have a timer input such as a slider that can be used to override any times that a set within the automations…if there is such a thing as a lookup timer that it uses before the automation starts. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel and if there is an example already out there I’ll keep looking. The developer of Irrigation Unlimited has done a great job but it is probably an overkill for my situation.
It’s never a good idea to linger in an automation, if Home Assistant restarts while the automation is waiting in a delay then the automation will be cancelled leaving your irrigation valves in whatever state they were in.
A better idea is to use timers to trigger your automation. Timers can be restored after a restart.
Personally I use weekly schedule helpers to trigger my irrigation valve automations. If Home Assistant was restarted at just the wrong time so that an automation missed the schedule turning off there is another automation that triggers if any valve has been on longer than a time set by an input number. I set this to longer than my maximum watering time plus the time it takes to restart my HA plus a small margin. So it would take two very unlikely timed restarts to mess this up and flood my yard.
As an unintended consequence if I manually turn on a valve for an extra one-off watering and forget about it, then it will automatically turn off at this over-run time.
Thanks Tom, well explained shit never considered what would happen if HA rebooted or shut down. Certainly opened my eyes. I like the idea of having a timer as a backup to shut-off your valve in the event things go pear-shape.
Another strategy to consider, depending on your hardware used, is to only start a cycle or single zone from HA, but keep the rest of the logic on the device. In my case, it’s a Sonoff Ch4 with ESPHome. The timing and turning off of valves happen on the device, so it’s not affected by an HA restart.