[FEATURE REQUEST] A scheduling 2 times of watering per day about homebridge-smart-irrigation

[MTry]

Thanks for your feedback.. at the outset it will take a significant work to make it water 2 times a day as the current logic would require a total overhaul. However, here are some of my thoughts based on your use case..

To answer your second query first - it is indeed possible to water around 8:00AM or even later in the evening if that is what you prefer! Change the 'sunriseOffset to a negative value - for example if you want the watering to get done by 2 hours after sunrise, you can use a value of '-120'! As a matter of fact the value of sunriseOffset can be -1440 to +1440 so theoretically you could choose to finish watering even 12 hours after sunrise in the evening while doing a recalculation 15 minutes prior to the watering run! If you dig deeper in the linked resources in Readme, you will notice that it is often advised to water early on in the morning as it allows the leaves to dry up during the day and also reduces the chances of mildew/fungus which can be an issue specially in tropical regions - something that will not happen when irrigation takes place in the evening. What we need is water to soak down to the roots rather than runoff - and this is best achieved when you water a little - wait and water a little more so that it gets a chance to percolate in the soil rather than runoff - you can achieve this by increasing the number of cycles upto 5 so all your zones are watered a little in each cycles replenishing the water requirement in 5 shots so to say. Remember - the moisture loss at the surface of the soil is a factor - but the amount percolated down to the roots is even more relevant. The heat after a rain is something a plant can deal with if its native to the region - and no amount of irrigation will solve the issue as such if the plant can't fundamentally take the sunshine it is exposed to.

Rainfactor - how I use it - turn it on for any zone exposed to direct rain so it can factor the amount of rain in calculations and turn it off for any zone not exposed - as this will in any case take into account the higher humidity and ETo when calculating the water requirement.

Estimations based weather are after all estimations - I do reduce the number of watering runs per week during monsoons as the same principles used during hot summers running over 40 degree centigrade do go a little overboard.

[MTry]

Rain threshold is in mm - so you can set it at a level of rainfall in mm above which you do not want the irrigation to be carried out.

[MTry]

..to add to the above explanation, it does not look at the possibility of rain rather it takes into account the predicted precipitation amount.

[Aekung]

Also, are there anyway I could set the watering time? Right now, it's set to water at 5:38am, which is too early. Are there any possibility that I can set it to sometimes later like 8:00am?

Thank you in advance.

[Aekung]

Wow! Thank you very much for a very clear and concise explanation and the use case example. It helps me better fine tuning the schedule and etc. Very much appreciated.

I now set the Cycle per zone for 3 cycles with the Sunrise offset of -120 and the max time of 30 minutes in all zone.

I'm not really sure about the Rain Threshold though. The scale of 0 - 100 is in percentage of raining? In this case, if I set to 70, does it mean the watering will be skipped if the chance of raining is over 70%?

Again, thank you very much in advance.

[Aekung]

Got it now. Thank you very much. Sorry that I overlook the unit of measurement for Rain Threshold.

Thank you very much for your fast response.