The Zones dashboard

Main page: Usage

The Zones tab is the everyday dashboard. For each zone it answers the daily question — will it water, when, and if not, why? — and offers one-tap actions. Full configuration lives under Setup → My Zones; a gear icon on each card jumps there.

Per-zone decision

Each card leads with a plain-language decision derived from the zone's state, its moisture balance and the next scheduled run:

• Will water ~X at <time> — a deficit exists and the next run will irrigate it.
• Deficit ~X, but the next run will likely be skipped (…) — a deficit exists, but a skip condition will probably veto the run.
• No watering needed — the soil has enough moisture.
• Deficit ~X — no schedule waters this zone; trigger manually — there is a deficit but nothing scheduled targets the zone.
• Turned off / Not calculated yet — the zone is disabled, or hasn't been calculated yet.

The decision uses the same gate as the actual irrigation runner, so it will not promise watering that a skip condition would cancel.

Outlook banner {#outlook-banner}

Above the zone cards, a banner summarises what happens next, globally:

• Next run — the next scheduled irrigate run, with its time, schedule name and target zones.
• Skip preview — whether that run will likely be skipped. When it will, tap “Why?” to expand the reasons (for example Rain forecast — 8.6 mm ≥ 2 mm). This is a forecast and may change before the run.
• If no schedule waters your zones, the banner says so and (in the admin panel) offers a link to set one up.

Live estimate {#live-estimate}

The official bucket is recalculated once a day, at your calculation time. To give you a current picture in between, each zone also shows a small read-only “Now ≈ −X mm (est.)” chip next to the bucket — an estimate of how much the moisture balance has drifted since the last calculation.

• Where your weather service provides hourly solar radiation (e.g. Open-Meteo), it uses the dedicated hourly FAO-56 Penman-Monteith reference-ET equation — not the daily equation run more often. Hover/tap the chip to see which method was used and the “as of” time.
• Other providers fall back to an estimate based on the day's temperature range, distributed across the day by sun position.
• The estimate is display-only: it never changes the stored bucket or the watering decision, and it is anchored to the last calculation so it does not double-count. See How it works.

Actions

For automatic zones, each card offers Update (fetch the latest weather/sensor data), Calculate (recompute the watering duration), and Irrigate now (open the linked valve immediately — this bypasses skip conditions). A row at the top applies the same actions to every zone at once: Refresh weather data, Recalculate durations and Water all zones now.

Run for a custom time {#run-zone}

Next to each zone's actions is a small Run for N min control: enter a number of minutes and press Run to water that zone for exactly that long. This is decoupled from the calculation — it ignores the computed duration, the deficit gate and any active rain delay — so it is handy for hand-watering a new planting or testing a valve. The water it delivers is still credited back to the bucket, so the next daily calculation stays honest. The same action is available as the run_zone service for automations.

While any run is in progress (a custom run, Irrigate now, or a scheduled run), the Run for N min control is replaced by a live countdown and a Stop button. Press Stop to end that zone's run immediately — the valve closes and the water already delivered is kept (the run is logged as partial). The same action is available as the stop_zone service for automations.

Rain delay / vacation hold {#rain-delay}

Above the zone cards, a Pause watering control lets you stop all automatic and scheduled irrigation for a while — for a rainy spell, a holiday, or while you work on the system. Tap Delay 24 h or Delay 48 h for a quick hold; while a hold is active the banner shows “Paused until …” with a Resume button to lift it early.

• The hold gates only automatic runs (schedules and the daily decision). Manual actions — Irrigate now, Water all zones now and Run for N min — still work, so you are never locked out of watering on demand.
• A paused scheduled run is recorded in the zone's run history as Paused (rain delay), so it is clear why nothing ran.
• The same hold is exposed on the hub device as the Pause until datetime entity plus Delay 24 h / 48 h and Resume buttons (see Entities), and as the set_rain_delay / clear_rain_delay services — so you can automate it (e.g. pause when a "vacation mode" helper turns on).

A card for non-admin users

The panel itself is admin-only, but you can put the same everyday view on any dashboard with the shipped Lovelace card so non-admin household members can see status and water on demand.

Main page: Usage