I have a summerhouse I'm Croatia 3000 km from where I live, Sweden.
Bought the house in Croatia 2 years ago and the garden was in a terrible condition.
Started the first year with cutting down and digging up dead trees and removing weed. And planted some palm trees and some Nerium.
This year I installed 200 meter drip irrigation. A standard water timer was not interesting for me since I wanted to be able to adjust schedule and the amount of water and put it on pause in rainy days and turn it of when the autumn rains begins. All of this by remote... 3000 km away.
So some smart Internet connected timer was needed.
First problem... Internet... 4g connection was quickly eliminated since it was not stable.
Connected the house to broadband (fixed Internet) and started looking for smart connected irrigation timers.
There are a few different options. I purchased an Hoselock Cloud system on eBay and installed it. It was compared to other brands cheaper. About 100 euro.
Installed it, connected it to my WiFi and downloaded the app. Success, I now could control my irrigation from anywhere in the world.
But one thing was bothering me, could it be trusted? How do I know that the valve in the device turns off just because the app says it is turned of?
The solution, a cheap WiFi connected outdoor surveillance camera that had its focus on the outlet of a part of the dripline. Now I could verify in the camera that it was watering when the app said so and turned of when it was supposed to.
Great! Everything was working fine and I went home to Sweden and everything worked excellent. For a while... Then my app somehow lost connection to the irrigation timer. Gaaaa what to do!!!? Fortunately I could observe in the camera that my water schedule was watering as planed. So now I'll let it water until rain starts and then ask some neighbour to turn the water supply off.
Reading customer reviews of the Hoselock timer has made me purchase another brand, Gardena Smart System, same concept but much more expensive. The plan is to install it next year and hopefully it will work better.
So my question is if someone else is using a connected smart irrigation system and can share some experience?