ET will manage your water use in a near perfect world, but not by itself as an effective metering tool for irrigation. Decisions that calculate evapotranspiration (ET) to run irrigation, sure, that’s all fine and well and I’m all for it, but without actual water flow being monitored and recorded, any smart controller is dumb as a rock if one of your irrigation valves is stuck on and is running 24-7 and you’re not there to notice it. Or you accidentally cut an irrigation wire when planting a shrub, and your irrigation doesn’t run anymore. Then your lawn dries up and starts to die, but your irrigation controller is still functioning.
Again, all can appear to be fine and well in the ET world and the online controller. Except for one small detail: Nothing is putting water on your lawn/garden. Or you just loss 10k gallons from a main line break.
The flow sensor option in OS 3.0 should definitely address that issue, but there’s no automatic SMS or email alerts in the system so you basically have to catch a ‘no flow’ or ‘high flow’ as soon as you can see it online. Or you’ll see a dead area of lawn/garden, a washout or a pool of running water somewhere it doesn’t belong. A master valve will prevent the high flow but you definitely should monitor ‘no flow’ situations, too.