Comment by cityofdelusion
7 hours ago
After years of doing this, I determined that dumb controllers are superior for my uses. A once a week irrigation with a simple rain sensor results in the same quality lawn/beds and better can run with pretty much zero maintenance burden on the sw/hw side. The vegetable garden is even dumber, just drip lines, a hose bib, and a dumb timer that flips daily in the morning powered by AS batteries. In my apartment days I just used an elevated water container and the same dumb timer to gravity feed my garden.
I find home lab stuff has far more return on investment for like automatic blinds, lights, etc. It’s not like you can just stay inside anyways and get amazing vegetables, you still need to be on top of thing like checking for pests and disease. The automatic garden is a myth.
I have almost everything in my house HA-automated, but anything touching the water supply is all on dumb physical valves and electrical timers. If my light switches don't work, that's annoying. If a robot vacuum doesn't run, that's frustrating. If a water valve is stuck open, that's catastrophic.
Catastrophic! Calm down you're not working in a chemical plant
There's a difference between automation for reliability and automation for tinkering
Yeah when I got to the point he was building a PC for this in the article it was a little shocking given the task at hand. I make do with a little $30 programmable dual zone unit that has lasted several seasons now. All I had to do was add a water hammer arrester.