Automatic Lawn Watering

My lawn watering is totally automatic.  it works so well, it uses the wind speed that is read from the Lethbridge, Alberta airport from Weather Underground web site, and decides if it should water, based on temperature, wind speed, and weather such as raining or has rained.  I love their new History reports on Weather Underground!

I can at anytime over-ride the controls or even give a voice command to what zone I think needs a bit more water.  I can even use my black-berry to log into my house, or my IPAQ and also control my watering.

as usual, just like everything else in my house, it is all made from scratch, junk and anything I can find to wire it together.  it works so good and is way more flexible than a controller you would normally buy from the store.  This is a simple way to control each zone, they are plug modules from www.X10.com

These modules work great!  what I did is use a 12volt adaptor that was scrap at work.  I got one for every module that I was going to use and just put each wall module with its own ID for HomeSeer.  from the wall adaptors they all run into the white box in the picture, where all it is, it a bunch of relays, just to buffer the 24VAC that I needed to send to the different zones.  I probably could of just placed 24VAC adaptors onto each module instead, but as you see these adaptors are just the right size, the 24VAC ones would of been larger.  I would have to leave a space between them if I used the larger ones.  So for now this works for me!

You can use the larger 24VAC adaptors yourself to make this project very easy to hook-up.  Wait until X10.com has another sale.  I got these in a bulk pack for a really good price.  These are cheap units and you do get what you paid for, but they are functional for the most part.  I do wish I could try the Levitons, as they have an AGC, but I cannot afford them.  I wish I could try them and let you know how they work, but since I cannot say, I think "Z" wave is the way to go in the future.  They do not have many devices yet, but I think as they develop, it will be awesome.

Now for my weather station, I use a local air-port.  I had someone help me with a script for HomeSeer to be able to read the current conditions and import the values into virtual devices that are one HomeSeer.  I have several conditions programmed in such as, if the wind is over 15 Km/H do not water, or if it is raining.  It is very flexible to what conditions you have and easy to program new ones into this system.  This is why I like HomeSeer controlling it, it is flexible.

The other big advantage is that HomeSeer will text message me the status, and or what-ever I wish it to send me.  I can also control it myself through my blackberry with WAP, or even normal HTML if I wish.  This makes it so it is very flexible to what you wish to control it.  I can log in from any computer, any type of computer and have full control of this system.  It has been very reliable so far.  I had one plug module go bad, but they seem to go bad in the off position, so it didn't do anything.

I am going to add an automatic fertilizer system to my lawn water system...when I get time I will complete the write-up here...