It seems like the 5 watt panel does not produce enough power to keep the control unit battery topped up. Just a day of cloudy wather and there is a problem, despite the panel being south facing. I'm surprised as I'm not using a pump. My ordinary water timer lasts a complete season on one set of batteries. It must be the WiFi that's the power hog. Any suggestions. I wondered about the using the top up power adaptor. But it doesn't look waterproof and could prevent the cover closing on the socket in my polytunnel which would be dangerous.
Could you please unplug your sensors for me for a few days and we can monitor how this effects the battery? We had a very small batch of control boxes last year that had a negative battery impact with sensors and I would like to make sure this is not the issue here.
Will do thanks. I assume you mean the soil sensors and not the temperature one? The soil sensor without the red band is not working anyway. So there is a problem there.
Disconnected the sensors today and the battery has started to charge. Indicator is now showing orange. So it is starting to look like there is a problem with the sensors drawing too much power from the control unit. As I mentioned previously only the red banded soil sensor has ever worked.
I have the same problem, so removed the soil sensors, but my bettery still red, so then i re positioned the solar panel to tip more towards the sun, getting plenty of power in, but battery still shows red on the app. not sure what else to try now
Update on the charging problem. Upgrading to from version 5 to version 6 of the control box seemed to do the trick - battery indicator green every day as you would expect with a south facing panel and no pump in use.
Unfortunately today, the problem has returned - battery draining fast on the hotest day of the year! I'm wondering whether some recent server side changes to my account may have affected battery use. Seems unlikely but it happened at the same time. Advice welcome!
Looks like the new problem is caused by my linking watering to a soil sensor which was causing half hourly watering in the hot weather. Although I am not using a pump, I understand that switching valve used in the system is quite energy intensive. A quick fix to this problem could be to limit the number of waterings triggered by the soil sensor to every few hours or something like that - like with the temperature sensor. Thanks to Theo for his help.
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Could you please unplug your sensors for me for a few days and we can monitor how this effects the battery? We had a very small batch of control boxes last year that had a negative battery impact with sensors and I would like to make sure this is not the issue here.
Many thanks -Stacy
Unfortunately today, the problem has returned - battery draining fast on the hotest day of the year! I'm wondering whether some recent server side changes to my account may have affected battery use. Seems unlikely but it happened at the same time. Advice welcome!