4.26Watering manager

The Watering Manager is the service behind the Watering Panel. It holds the pump, rain sensor and valve zones, and the gateway runs the watering cycles. Schedules are not set here: the user creates them in the app.

#What it does

• Opens KNX valve actuators one zone after another, for a runtime set per zone.
• Optionally switches a pump on and off around the valves, with a valve-feedback safety check.
• Optionally skips or stops watering when a KNX rain sensor reports rain.
• Optionally writes the number of the running zone to a KNX address.

Everything is driven over KNX. The Watering Manager has no Modbus part.

#Before you enable it

1. The KNX engine must be enabled and the valve actuators must be reachable on the bus (see KNX engine).
2. Know the group address of each valve (on/off), and optionally its status address, the pump address and the rain sensor address.
3. Add a Watering Panel to a page so the user has somewhere to start, stop and schedule watering.

#Settings

Open Server > Internal services > Watering Manager. The Enabled switch at the top is Off by default.

#General tab

#Zones tab

The Zones tab has one button, Configure Zones (N), which opens the Zones Editor. Use Add, Clone, Remove, Up and Down to manage the list. There is always at least one zone, and the last one cannot be removed.

The order of the list is the order the zones run in. The position in the list is also the zone number sent to Active Zone Status GA, so reordering zones changes the numbers.

#How it works on the gateway

• Schedules are created and edited by the user in the Watering Panel (a start time, days of the week, up to 24 schedules). They are stored on the gateway, not in the Configurator, and a deploy from the Configurator keeps them. The same goes for the Rain suspend hours (1 to 168, default 6).
• A run opens zone 1 (command, then the Safety Delay, then the feedback check if a Feedback group is set), switches the pump on, and runs the zone for its Default runtime. To change zone, the next valve is opened and confirmed before the previous one is closed, so the pump never works against closed valves. At the end the pump is switched off, the gateway waits the Safety Delay and closes the last valve. Active Zone Status GA is set to 0.
• Feedback failure: if a zone has a Feedback group and it does not report open within the Safety Delay plus 3 seconds, the run stops, the pump is switched off and every zone is closed.
• Rain: when a schedule is due and rain is detected, that schedule is suspended for the Rain suspend hours and tried again afterwards. If rain is detected while watering, everything stops after 5 minutes of continuous rain. The gateway uses the latest value it has seen on the Rain KNX Group. If it has seen none, it treats the weather as dry.
• Stop All in the app turns the pump off, waits the Safety Delay and closes every zone.

#Example

A garden with 4 valves and a booster pump:

1. Enabled on, Safety Delay (seconds) 5.
2. Use Pump Control on, Pump KNX Group 1/1/10, Pump Feedback Group 1/1/11.
3. Use Rain Detection on, Rain KNX Group 1/1/20, Rain Detected Value 1 means rain detected.
4. Active Zone Status GA 1/1/30.
5. Zones: Lawn 1/1/1 (feedback 1/1/2, 15 min), Beds 1/1/3 (feedback 1/1/4, 10 min), Hedge 1/1/5 (feedback 1/1/6, 8 min), Trees 1/1/7 (feedback 1/1/8, 12 min).
6. Deploy, then in the app create a schedule Morning at 06:00, all days. The full cycle is about 45 minutes.

#Tips and common problems

• Nothing starts at the scheduled time: check that Enabled is on, the project is deployed, and the zones have a KNX group.
• The run stops after the first valve: the zone's Feedback group never reports 1. Fix the status address or clear it.
• Watering is skipped on a dry day: the Rain Detected Value is the wrong way round for the sensor.
• A zone is missing from the cycle: it has no KNX group, or the user has disabled it in the app.

#See also

• Watering Panel
• Water tank pump control
• KNX engine
• Using system objects
• Deploying to a gateway