Manual Rain Delay Logic

[mb42]

I’m sure I could set up a test to determine this, but figured I would ask. How does the manual Rain Delay feature function? Does it truly DELAY the programs by a day or two – depending on how many hours I choose to delay? Or, does it simply SKIP the programs set to run during the delay period?

The latter can be problematic, especially if I manually delay for, say, 24 hours and it skips a program that runs very infrequently. The preference is to just run everything a day later.

[Ray]

It’s the second way you described: the manual rain delay simply skips programs that are scheduled to run during the delay period. The issue with pushing everything till the rain delay ends is that it significantly complicates the algorithm: first, the controller will need a way to ‘cache’ the program data during the rain delay period; second, if the rain delay is very long (like several days), it will need to ‘cache’ a lot of data, and it keep pushing programs that are supposed to run normally. This is not easy to implement, and probably causes more confusion.

If the rain delay missed an infrequent program, you can use the mobile app to do an ad-hoc run of the program. Also, note that firmware 2.0.6 now supports logging, so it’s easier to find out what programs / stations have run during the past several days.

[mb42]

My recommendation would be this… Implement the Rain Delay feature in terms of days not hours. Commercial controllers I am familiar with are programmed in this manner. This makes it easier to push back any programming rather than skipping it.

For example, setting a rain delay of 1 day would delay everything scheduled during the current day, a 2 day rain delay also delays watering scheduled for tomorrow. Then, simply add the number of days delayed to the “Starting in X Days” parameter for each program. So if “Program 1” was set to run in 3 days, it would, under a 2 day Rain Delay, now be scheduled to run in 5 days.

In the case of a delay caused by rainfall, would you ever really be delaying watering for just a few hours? If it rains, I know I always want to delay (not skip) my watering schedule for at least a day or two. Thus, I believe the Rain Delay should be a true delay, and in days.

And if you would like to retain the current approach of skipping programming by a number of hours, you could potentially retain it as a “Shutdown Period” or similar. I think that better reflects the function.

[Author]

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