Newbie question about Rain Delay

[Piqi]

(Sorry for the dumb question, but I couldn’t find an answer in the manual or the dozens of seemingly-relevant forum posts I searched through.)

I’ve had OpenSprinklerPi installed for about a week, and I’m very happy so far. Today, my lawn guys aerated and reseeded, and we’re getting rain, so I can’t really test this for myself right now:

Assume I have a program that runs daily at 02:00 (fixed time), and after all zones/durations, it ends at 05:00. Prior to it starting (say, at 01:00) I set a manual rain delay that ends at 06:00 (after it would normally have run and ended). How does the OpenSprinkler firmware handle the end of the delay? Does it (1) resume normal operations, the sprinklers stay off for now, and the program will run at 02:00 the next day (effectively just skipping today), or does it (2) run the program immediately after the delay ends at 06:00 (effectively making it a true “delay,” just like a rain delay at a baseball game, where the event occurs as soon as the delay ends)?

This is certainly of general interest, but I’m keen to know right now so I don’t drown my newly-seeded lawn.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

-Piqi

[dun4cheap]

In my experience, the rain delay is precise to the minute. So a 2 day delay set on Tuesday at 2pm, would mean the delay does not end until Thursday at 2PN. So if your program was set to start everyone day at 1:59PM then your program would not run until Friday at 2PM.

[Ray]

Does it (1) resume normal operations, the sprinklers stay off for now, and the program will run at 02:00 the next day (effectively just skipping today), or does it (2) run the program immediately after the delay ends at 06:00 (effectively making it a true “delay,” just like a rain delay at a baseball game, where the event occurs as soon as the delay ends)?

Answer: you can think of rain delay as ‘silencing’ the watering while the rain delay is active. As a result, programs that should have started during rain delay will NOT be rescheduled, and program that started shortly before the rain delay is active and got interrupted will NOT be resumed. Actually, more precisely, it should be that ‘zones which are affected by rain delay’ are silenced, in contrast, zones that are set to ‘Ignore Rain Delay’ will not be affected by rain delay.

[Piqi]

Answer: you can think of rain delay as ‘silencing’ the watering while the rain delay is active. As a result, programs that should have started during rain delay will NOT be rescheduled, and program that started shortly before the rain delay is active and got interrupted will NOT be resumed. Actually, more precisely, it should be that ‘zones which are affected by rain delay’ are silenced, in contrast, zones that are set to ‘Ignore Rain Delay’ will not be affected by rain delay.

Thank you. So, I don’t have to calculate my rain delays to match when I next want the sprinklers to turn on, I can just extend the delay past the program start time and that program will be skipped until the next day (assuming daily runs, etc.). That’s exactly what I was hoping for.

(“Cool factor” aside, this is infinitely better than my old manual timer!)

[Author]

Posts