Sprinkler System Automation Questions

Configuration
,
1

Hi,

I’m looking for a bit of advice… I have recently installed an Ecowitt Weather Station (WS-90) along with 8 soil moisture sensors (one for each zone of my sprinkler system). I currently have a Rachio Gen 1 sprinker system also.

I’d like to be able to use the weather station to provide weather data to my sprinker system, and then use the moisture sensors to determine when watering needs to occur. I’m open to buying a new sprinkler controller (OpenSprinkler, Orbit, Rachio Gen 3, etc.). However, I’m not sure where to start tying this all together in an automation.

In an ideal world, logically it would work something like this:

Perform Daily Soil Check:

  • Is the soil moisture below x% (say 30%) from Ecowitt Soil Sensor Y/N?
    • If N, skip watering.
    • If Y, is it going to rain today from Ecowitt Weather Data or Wunderground Y/N?
      • If Y, skip watering.
      • If N, water yard until soil moisture reaches x% (say 40%) or water for a set time.
        Repeat daily…

So, here are my questions…

  • What sprinker controller would be best for this?
  • How do I begin to write the automation above?

Many thanks in advance for any help…

2

I don’t know about the other brands, but you can already set the zone moisture percent from the Rachio integration in HA, which would allow you to use the built in daily flex features. So for each zone you could set the moisture percent from your soil sensors every day and Rachio should adjust accordingly. Just one option.

3

That’s great. Is this a feature in all Rachio devices or just the Gen 3?

4

I have the Gen1 currently, and only see 14 entities. None of them show soil moisture. Perhaps I need to upgrade to the Gen3, which is totally fine.

5

There’s nothing to show the moisture levels in HA, but there is a service to set the levels. Check out the rachio docs . It works on all generations of the devices, but at least one of your zones has to be currently set up in a flex daily schedule for the service to show up, since that’s the only type of schedule that uses moisture levels.

6

IMG_1763
IMG_17631179×2140 190 KB

7

Brian, this is very helpful. Thanks. I’m new to writing automations… Could you give me a pointer on how I pull the value from the moisture sensor and then take that value to update the % for the zone in Rachio?

I’ve figured out how to update the %, but am stuck on how to read the value from the moisture sensor and then write that to Rachio automatically.

8

It depends how you want to trigger the automation… I would think the easiest way would be based on a time, like once or twice a day. As far as reading the state of the sensor, a template is probably the way to go. I’m not sure how your sensors display their data in HA, but something like this for the action:

service: rachio.set_zone_moisture_percent
target:
  entity_id: switch.back_yard_east
data:
  percent: "{{states('sensor.soil_moisture_sensor_1')|int}}"

You could also look into using For Each in a script to set all the zones from one automation like described here: Script Syntax - Home Assistant