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Zone controllers, weather-aware watering, and the distance problem nobody mentions until the signal drops.
Watering by the weather rather than the clock is the whole idea, and the distance between a controller and the house is what usually defeats it.
On this page
Start here
A conventional timer waters on Tuesday whether or not it poured on Monday. That is the waste, and it is substantial across a season.
A weather-aware controller checks a forecast, or a local sensor, and skips. Some adjust the duration to the season without being asked, which is the part people notice on a bill.
Everything else here is convenience. Zones from a handset, a schedule changed from a holiday. Pleasant, but the weather awareness is what pays.
In detail
These are very different projects. Tap whichever applies.
What is in the garden now?
What that means appears underneath
General guidance on the options. Anything connecting to a mains supply may be regulated where you live.
Worth knowing
The mechanism matters, because they fail in different ways.
The controller fetches a forecast for your area and skips a cycle when rain is expected. Requires no extra hardware, and works well where the forecast is reliable and the area is not unusual.
Where it goes wrong is microclimate. A forecast for a region does not know that the rain went round your valley, and a garden that has been skipped for three days on the strength of showers that never arrived is a real outcome.
A rain sensor in the garden reports what actually fell. A soil moisture probe goes further and reports what is actually in the ground, which is the thing that matters.
More hardware, more batteries, and considerably more accurate. A soil probe is the only device here that measures the question rather than predicting it.
The better controllers use a forecast to plan and a sensor to correct. That combination handles both the storm nobody predicted and the shower that missed you.
Where the failure is expensive. This is a device that opens a valve on a water supply and is trusted to close it. A controller that hangs mid-cycle, or a valve that sticks, can run for hours unnoticed — overnight, or while a household is away. Every system should have a manual isolating valve that everyone knows about, and a run-time limit set on every zone.
Practical
The three things that catch people out after installation.
Irrigation controllers live in garages, sheds and outside walls — the furthest points from a router, frequently behind masonry. This is the commonest complaint in the category and it is not usually the controller's fault.
Better systems keep the schedule locally and run it whether or not the network is up, which turns a connection failure into an inconvenience rather than a dead garden. Worth checking before buying.
In climates that freeze, a system left full over winter can split pipes and heads. Draining or blowing out the lines is seasonal work that no controller does for you, however clever the scheduling.
Connecting an irrigation system to a mains water supply is regulated in many places, commonly requiring backflow prevention so that garden water cannot be drawn back into the drinking supply. Some areas also restrict watering during droughts, with penalties.
Both are questions for your water supplier or local authority. They differ enough between places that no general page can answer them, and getting the backflow question wrong is a public health matter rather than a private one.
Before you buy
Tap a question to read the answer.
Usually. Most domestic irrigation valves are low-voltage solenoids driven the same way, and replacement controllers are built to drive them. What matters is the number of zones the controller supports against the number you have.
Count the wires at the existing controller before ordering. That is what decides it.
The better ones do not. A controller that holds the schedule locally runs it regardless, and uses the connection only to fetch forecasts and accept changes.
Systems that route every decision through a manufacturer's servers stop watering when the connection drops. In a garage at the edge of the Wi-Fi, that distinction matters a great deal.
Manufacturers quote large figures and the real number depends entirely on your climate. In a place with unpredictable summer rain the saving is substantial, because a conventional timer waters through every shower.
In a reliably dry summer climate there is far less to skip, and the benefit is mostly seasonal adjustment rather than rain skipping.
That is the whole point, and it is also the situation where a stuck valve does the most damage. Set a run-time limit on every zone, and make sure somebody nearby knows where the isolating valve is.
Some controllers report an unexpectedly long run or an unusual flow. On a system left unattended for weeks, that is a feature worth paying for.
Keep reading
A controller in a garage or a garden wall is at the edge of most home networks.
Read the Wi-Fi guideHow we checked this
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