Smart Irrigation for Home Assistant

After installing the Smart Irrigation integration, several entities and interfaces are automatically created in Home Assistant to facilitate irrigation management and automation:

• Sidebar Panel: Used for configuring the integration settings.
• Sensor Entities: One sensor entity is created for every configured irrigation zone.
• Services: A set of services available for automating irrigation tasks.
• Start Event: An event that triggers when irrigation is scheduled to finish before sunrise.
• Automations: The combination of sensors, services, and events allows for custom automation logic.
• Enhanced Scheduling: Support for advanced scheduling and integration with Irrigation Unlimited.

The integration uses the PyETO module to compute ET via the FAO-56 Penman-Monteith equation. Solar radiation is the dominant term in this equation.

• With Radiation Source: The system performs a full Penman-Monteith calculation. This is the most accurate method.
• Without Radiation Source: The system automatically falls back to a Hargreaves-style approximation, estimating radiation from temperature. This is less precise, particularly in cloudy or coastal climates.

Note: You do not manually toggle between these methods. The integration automatically uses radiation whenever a source provides it and estimates it otherwise.

A zone's State determines how its irrigation duration is managed:

• Automatic: The integration automatically calculates irrigation duration. This mode requires a module and a sensor group to be configured.
• Manual: You manually specify the irrigation duration. A module and sensor group are not required.
• Disabled: The zone is inactive. The duration is set to 0 and no calculations are performed. Setting a module or sensor group is optional in this state.

To correctly track precipitation, use the Total precipitation metric.

• Source: Use a sensor that accumulates precipitation over time (e.g., 'daily rain' or 'total rain').
• Aggregation: Set the aggregation type to Delta. This allows the integration to handle value resets (e.g., when a daily rain sensor resets to zero at midnight).
• Note: The value should represent a total amount over a time period, not a current precipitation rate.

Smart Irrigation runs once per day based on a single active trigger selected in the General configuration. While you can define multiple triggers (e.g., sunset, solar azimuth, offsets), only the one designated as the 'active trigger' will initiate the daily irrigation run.

• Default behavior: The default trigger is Default (sunrise minus total watering duration), which ensures the watering cycle finishes exactly at sunrise.

The Continuous updates feature is an experimental way to capture granular weather data to avoid missing weather patterns.

Requirements for a zone to use continuous updates:

1. The zone must be set to automatic.
2. It must use a sensor group that does not rely on a weather service (none of the data sources can be set to weather service).
3. It must not use forecasting. Set forecast days for PyETO to 0.

Behavior:

• Zones meeting these requirements are excluded from the standard automatic update/calculation cycle and instead use continuous updates.
• Zones not meeting these requirements follow the standard automatic update and calculation schedule.
• A sensor debounce setting is available to control the speed of continuous updates.

Warning: This feature is experimental and may contain bugs.

Advanced scheduling features are managed via Home Assistant services and blueprints rather than the main configuration UI. These include:

• Recurring schedules: Create daily, weekly, monthly, or interval-based schedules using the smart_irrigation.create_recurring_schedule service.
• Seasonal adjustments: Automatically adjust irrigation parameters based on the current season.
• Irrigation Unlimited integration: Bidirectional support for the Irrigation Unlimited component.
• Automation blueprints: Ready-to-use templates located in the blueprints/ directory.