Flow Meter monitoring/logging

[RonRN18]

I am contemplating adding a flow meter to track water usage. As I don’t have one yet, I am curious as to how to collect the data. I see that if I go under “Edit Options”->”Weather and Sensors”, I can select sensor as “Flow” and set up how many pulses equal a gallon and that I would connect the two wires from the flow meter to the 2-wire sensor connector on my main controller. That part seems rather straight forward and I hope the rest is too, but I don’t know. When I review/export logs, will it add a field for gallons (or I guess liters, if I set it to register L/m instead of G/m)? Will it show, for example, that station 1 ran at a certain time, for a certain time and used a certain amount of water?

So far, I’ve found the logs to be a little cumbersome. I export the file as a JSON, then convert that to a CSV file, then convert that to a Microsoft Excel file. This gives me currently 4 columns which I’ve discovered are, Program, Station, Run-time (in seconds) and Start-time. The start time appears to be “Epoch” or “Unix” time, based on my local timezone. I use the formula {=CELL/(60*60*24)+”1/1/1970″} to convert the CELL with the time on it to local time. I can then format the cell to show date and/or time. From there, I can evaluate the data from a variety of perspectives. My question then is, will a new field/column show up to indicate flow? If so, will it be the value of pulses or a value of gallons or liters?

Will the controller log any pulses when a station is NOT activated by the controller? This may be interesting data… it could advise whether there was a leak or if someone manually opened a valve.

[Ray]

The current firmware (2.1.6) will log flow value at the end of each program (or more precisely, when the running queue turns from non-empty to empty). It records the total amount of pulses (flow count) during the program run. Note that it does not convert this number to volume automatically, instead, you can take this count and multiply it with the flow pulse rate to convert it to actual volume (L or gallon).

The API document:
https://opensprinkler.freshdesk.com/solution/articles/5000678648-api-document-firmware-2-1-6-current-
last page documents how to use the jl command to retrieve flow sensing log values. Note that you need to use the type=fl parameter as described. Without it the output will not contain flow sensor data.

There is also a real-time flow sensor variable flcrt and associated time interval flwrt. Refer to API document page 2 for descriptions. The real-time values are not logged, due to the concern that it may generate a large amount of log data (it updates every 30 seconds). But if needed it can certainly be logged.

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