Community Home Community B-hyve Hose Faucet Feature request: Avoid concurrent watering

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  • #79526
    tombammann
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    The most hotly requested feature, hereby formally requested as it had been dozens of times on the old Orbit forum that was removed.

    Can you *please* develop the platform to allow faucet timers to act as zones of one device. Either with the hub as the device, or an orbit controller as the device, or with the cloud as the device. Such that, zones from multiple faucet devices do not try to water at the same time. It is impossible to manage 8 or more faucet controllers, yet it is advertised that you can have up to 32 working from a hub. Well, 32 faucet controllers is never going to work from garden taps as the pressure and flow rate just won’t work.

    With existing houses, it is not practicable for everyone to install high pressure piping and cables around an already landscaped (paved, concreted) areas. Therefore, existing garden taps are used for all sorts of irrigation, including turf areas with popup sprinklers. Not one single other irrigation zone can turn on at the same time as a popup zone.

    Sure, there are ‘workarounds’, but they are very subpar. Preferred watering times or ‘restriction times’ methods of working around this flaw, means that you have to know what the maximum duration of watering is in the peak of summer, what the ‘rest times’ between sessions of watering (when on a slope, or heavy clay soils where absorption is slow), summate those times, and keep a spreadsheet of how long each zone will need so you can work out the start time of the next zone.

    I’d very much like it to work like any other irrigation controller, where no watering of any zones will overlap unless you specifically enable particular zones to work concurrently. It should begin the next zone whilst a zone is having a rest period.

    By reverse engineering the bhyve platform which does not have a public API, there are people from for example the hubitat community that have already created a better working controller for bhyve faucets.

    Happy to purchase the next version of your real irrigation controller, just for the hub of the faucets to link to, so that the faucets can be controlled by an actual controller without overlapping zones. I did hear via my local supplier that there’s a beta firmware of the XR controller that will enable such functionality, but then I’ve been told by bhyve support separately, that this was never the case. Can you please be open about your intentions on this?

    Meanwhile, other faucet timers such as Linktap provide this functionality, so why can’t Bhyve? It’s literally just programming and firmware updates that are required.

    #79543
    PeanutButter281
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    100% agree! This is very irritating that for 2 years for sure I have been told the feature is coming and it never does. This should be able to behave no different than the inground timers. Come on Orbit make this product great! If in the next year or two I think I may jump ship and start looking for other hose timers that can handle this.

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