There are so many posts in here on this, but I just can't seem to find an easy answer (not the fastest reader and over an hour invested so far). Apparently API requirements have changed tilted weather on it's head a bit?
I'm looking to reduce the amount of time a switch is turned on for if it has rained in past 24 hours (or if forecast to rain, whatever is easiest). I'm in Canada so international support important.
Can anyone provide a simple set of steps and maybe links to required learning?
Thanks for your response. I'll look more into open weather. I am looking for the software based part of the solution. Have a rain bird valve an switch already setup, just need a way to trigger it based on weather.
If anyone has a simple description of how to get open weather plugged into and triggering a switch in HE it would be appreciated.
Hope this isn't a duplicate post, but if it is, I couldn't find the original.
I am answering my own question here in hope it will assist others. This community is awesome, but I often find the posts highly technical, long and fragmented. So I am going to provide a very high level answer to this question, and if anyone wants more details I am happy to provide it.
First off, as it turns out, it is very easy to setup a simple inexpensive plant or grass watering system using Hubitat and a few parts.
What I was looking to do was to simply water using a basic Amazon flower watering hose kit to a number of plant boxes and baskets on my deck, each night at sunset. But if it was reported to be raining, then water for a much shorter duration. I know I could have used moisture sensors, but they are expensive and in my experience not very reliable.
Hardware required:
flower watering kit as needed (search irrigation kit)
rain bird valve CP075
power supply (this valve prefers a 24 VAC 750 mA unit)
wireless switch of your choice (ideally outdoor hardened)
some kind of waterproof container. I actually just went with a mini rubbermaid container. It sits under cover so full waterproofing in my case was not a huge issue.
Total = about $45 CAD (i already had the power supply from another project)
HE Configuration:
get an openweathermap.org free registration (thanks rlithgow1). Take them about 2 hours to activate the feed. Yes, the Weather Underground api appears to be dead, ignore earlier posts on getting it working, because it's dead. Darksky too.
setup a virtual switch in HE using the openweathermap integrated driver. You will find the API key in the validation email they send. You can create others but I stuck with the default and it worked fine.
setup a rulemachine rule with a conditional action IF/ELSE to look to the weather status in openweathermap to see if it contains rain, and if not water longer. Under the IF/Then rule to find the openweathermap status select New Condition under rule element and and Customer Attribute and then the virtual device (I called mine weather). I used 'rain' as my status syntax, but I am not sure that is right. It seems like it should work as it should come up regularly referencing their group 5xxx section on rain: Weather Conditions - OpenWeatherMap
Other than several hours I spent trying to find a simple example of this on the forum, it really only took about 30 minutes to setup once I had all the parts (plus another 30 to write this post ;). It does exactly what I want, is cheap and unlike an off the shelf timer I can of course view logs and status and monitor remotely through the dashboard.
Not fancy, but cheap and functional.
Again thanks to others who's posts I gleaned info from and all those that worked on the openweathermap project.
WARNING never do you own electrical work, you could die. There I said it.
Hope this is useful to someone. Again I am impressed with the capability of HE.
