Recently, I’ve set up a manual micro-drip system for our green house and flowers. I’ve been meaning to do something to automate watering schedules for our the micro drip system and our lawn and even ordered a solenoid valve from the internets a while back. It arrived a couple of weeks ago, and with a rainy sunday, I was finally ready to tackle this project.
Basically I just combined a z-wave light switch with the solenoid switch, stuffed it into a waterproof box and connected it to the water hose. I also added some heat shrink with glue to waterproof the solenoid sensor. I took some leftover connectors I had to attach it to a garden hose connector. Presto:
Now with this setup I can easily set up home assistant automatons to do watering schedules while we’re on vacation, and even integrate with YR to skip rainy days. And no cloud required :) Also, if it short circuits for some reason, it will default to being off. As a potential improvement I’m considering adding a flow gauge so that I can measure how much water I’m pouring into the garden, and to shut it down if there’s suddenly a drastic flow increase.