hey everybody Sam here welcome back to our Channel welcome back to our garden in today's video we're
going to have a little bit of a tech video we have a garden smart watering system to put into place I
want to bring you along as we install it set it up with the app use it but of course two weeks
later check in with you and give you our real life experiences thoughts and how we've used it overall
all right guys what we have for you today is the rainpoint Smart Plus garden water system this is
actually the super experience package we're gonna be showing to you guys today there are a lot of
different components a lot of different packages kits and add-ons you can get so this is kind of
stuff is interesting to you be sure to check the link down below and see what all rainpoint
offers this is a seven piece kit consisting of a Smart Plus irrigation display Hub two Zone water
timer two soil and moisture sensors a water flow meter high Precision rain sensor and an
outdoor air temperature and humidity sensor yes there's a lot of stuff in this I guess that's why
it's called the super experience package for the connection and configuration of all these devices
we need a couple of things one we need a lot of batteries for all these individual things we need
a power source for the main Hub and I need to be a little bit closer to our home's Wi-Fi to
connect everything and then hopefully see that it reaches out here to the Garden so let's transfer
ourselves indoors and continue with setting up and connecting everything to each other we've
moved into the house now because we need to set up the main hub first you need a power source
it does have slots for Batteries but these are considered as backup so you don't want to run it
solely off battery power what we have done also is go ahead and put in all of the batteries and
all of the devices it uses somewhere around 17 double a batteries and three AAA batteries but
that's going to depend on what kit you get and how many components you have what I'm going to
do is a little bit of Show and Tell with the Hub but also do a screen recording on my phone because
you do all the configuration and connecting of the Hub to your home's Network as well as all the
other pieces you've got through your app on your smart device the first thing to
do is hold down the top button up here that says Wi-Fi hold it for five seconds and then
I'll put this into the pairing mode once that says scan here on my phone I can tell it that
all the steps have been completed tap next and it is now searching my home network for this device
once it finds your device it's going to ask you do you want to add it I'm
going to say yes by clicking on ADD and then it tells me to rename this device
and there we go here on my phone you can see the app interface it tells me the indoor temperature
and humidity it's currently 69 degrees with a 53 humidity in the house it tells us our high and low
temperature as well as our high and low humidity very cool with the Hub added I'm going to tap on
the back arrow at the top left and it takes me to the main screen of the app here once I did enable
location I didn't want to do it at first but you need it for the weather forecast we can see at the
top left today's forecast is 81 degrees Fahrenheit of a high and 55 degrees Fahrenheit for a low with
partly sunny skies we have a Northeast wind of six miles per hour and a five percent chance of rain
yep I'm gonna geek out on this one a little bit aren't we all right at this point what I'm going
to do now is add on all of our devices that should be as simple as clicking the plus sign
at the top right selecting the device from their list whether it be a hub a controller
sensors or anything of the sort so we'll go into that process click in the connect button
on them letting them search and scan and add them into the app I will say that's really
cool with this app as you go through adding your devices you know you've got the little
what is this water flow meter yeah water flow meter in the app when you click on ADD device
there's pictures of it and it's got everything listed pretty well so it's nice it doesn't make
you go search for the user manuals I've not had to look at any other manuals yet just running
the app adding the device it walks you through exactly how to do things so in this case let's
add in this water flow sensor here it's named flow meter it says ready for pairing yes keep
it close to the hub tap on next and here it says insert the batteries to into the
device to start to reset and reconnect hold the button on the device until it reboots
there we go after that it's connected as you can see here on my phone very very cool also going up
to the settings on all of these devices so far it has allowed me to change the name to whatever I
want so we'll call this one I don't know meter I guess because it's going to be a water meter
there are also sub options within all of these devices like this one we can tell it to give us
a warning on water usage we can configure water usage correction that's pretty cool you can plug
in a coefficient of variation with that flow gives you the device information tells you your battery
status your Wi-Fi signal your radio frequency signal so you know if you're out of range or
getting close to it and that is really cool this one is actually pretty limited the other ones such
as this guy the water timer yeah the water timer it has a lot of settings off camera I played with
it and I set the left and right you can choose the default duration when you turn it on you
can make it 10 15 20 30 minutes a couple hours whatever you want there's also missed options
you can program in there there's a lot of stuff built in so it's definitely one of those things
where play around with the app play around with the individual device and just explore because
you can definitely geek out on this stuff so at this point it's time to take the stuff that goes
outdoor to The Great Outdoors hopefully it will reach because it is quite a distance
from our home to our garden but otherwise see if it works and start putting things in place foreign
[Applause]
so we went ahead and got that hooked up it was pretty easy again it does have two zones but
we're pretty much just going to use one zone for our garden and the other we'll use for a
water hose to do the berries fruit trees that type thing it does come with two soil sensors
I guess kind of for the two zones but since we're only mainly using one zone we'll just
put it in two separate places and see how it does this does have a Best Line right here
this is how far up you want the soil to come because these are all little sensors right here
oh
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guys got everything hooked up out here in the garden we have our rain meter up here on top
of a wooden bracket that I made I coated it in a Spar urethane exterior spray finish so it should
last a good long while and then also hung our outdoor temperature humidity sensor from below
that so we got our one little weather station section up there kind of out of the way then
I also installed our water timer our dual hose connection got everything figured out plumbed
up connected up to our garden irrigation and now I'm ready to use my app and turn on the garden
water for the first time so I'm going to tap on water Timer number one irrigation confirm
[Applause] there it is so awesome it works
everything's hooked up and everything is working and is off doing our first garden
irrigation what I want to do now is actually stop the video let a couple of days go by let
me get more familiar with the system set up some schedules let's get a couple of garden
waterings under our belt so we can see our data here our water logs and measurements and
who knows maybe we'll get some rain and we'll check that rain meter if not I'll
get out here on the ladder and pour some water in that thing to make sure it works
as promised here it is a handful of days later I can't say that we got a lot of rain but there
has been some rain go through the rain gauge and it does work it is very high Precision I think
one of the days we caught like a little blip of rain and I told Angela I said hey wait a second
did it rain and she said no I was watering the strawberries maybe I like sprayed a little bit
up there too so that was cool very nice it's also handy to see that we did not get much rain it is
definitely the dry part of the Year here and over the past week we have only had rain about
once that's not too much but that's perfect to see it's great to see how much rain we do or
don't get to confirm whether or not we should or should not be watering our garden as often as we
do speaking of water in that Garden having the timer is fantastic it is so awesome so we have
the black tubing irrigation and a lot of it is still exposed which means during the day those
pipes get super hot the perk of having a water timer means that I can set this whole system to
water our garden at about about seven o'clock in the morning that gives all the night for
all of the tubing to cool off the water to cool down get back down to a safe temperature and the
first thing before the sun gets out or starts to heat up it Waters the garden getting them
ready for the next day to grow that's fantastic it means we don't have to wake up early we don't
have to get a rooster to wake us up on time and we can just kind of take the thought process out
of watering our garden we know everything is being done correctly exactly where we want it
at the perfect time and that's just great we tend to be busy people we have a lot of stuff
going on so to automate this is a wonderful time saver sanity saver and also of course a garden
saver too all right so let's talk about the sensors themselves and specifically I want to
hit on the soil moisture temperature sensors the moisture sensors on them look great they
work great at least they seem to be accurate I can definitely see their moisture meter or
level rise and fall as we have watering systems whether we irrigate rainstorms or
we're out here at the was just hitting stuff willy-nilly it definitely reflects that and
operates correctly the temperature sensors also work fine the only thing I have found is that
they are hotter than what I think is reality I have used my cooking thermometer like a big
meat probe you have wires and I've stuck it in the beds looking at the soil temperature of the
meat thermometer versus what the sensor says and on average the sensors are about five maybe 10
degrees hotter than what I'm reading with the meat thermometer that could be the thermometer
being off it could be the soil temperature meter being off or it could be a mixture of both I'm
not exactly sure I would definitely like to see a calibration or adjustment feature within the
temperature sensors to correct them there is a sensor correction function for the main Hub
but whenever I go into one of the soil sensors they're setting menu here I don't see a sensor
correction there that would be an awesome thing to add if the manufacturer is watching this and their
r d Department's thinking Hmm how can we make this thing better giving me the option to adjust
and calibrate my temperature sensors to what I get in reality on hand would be phenomenal in the
meantime though we have our sensors kind of shaded with our straw mulch and we'll know whatever
they're reading kind of scale it back a little bit they're a little bit excited on temperature but
otherwise it's still great to have that data it is nice to see how the temperatures fluctuate up
and down we can look for abnormal spikes or dips and it's still very handy data to have on hand
the same kind of thing applies to this guy the little outdoor temperature humidity sensor it
does tend to run a little bit hotter than what we think reality is it is in direct sunlight having
that in the shade would help and again it would be nice to have a calibration feature on this as well
but regardless I'm just nitpicking things at this point if my only complaint is that I wish I could
calibrate stuff better that's a pretty good sign of a good product already out of the box the way
we have the two Zone water timer set up is we have one zone for all of our raised bed gardens the
black tubing and our irrigation and the other is connected to our water hose that we use on demand
we have a lot of luffa gourd planted over here on the long side of our Greenhouse that we haven't
yet plumbed into our irrigation so the water hose for that plus our blueberry bushes and a raspberry
plants way back there make it great to be able to see how much water we're using but have the split
system so we don't have to disconnect irrigation to use garden hose have other Splitters in the
system and just make things more complicated than they really need to be I was curious with this kit
since it came with the water flow meter if this two Zone controller also will tell you your water
usage yes it does which is great it allows me just to leave this one box here and the actual water
flow meter itself is over at another yard hydrant we use for washing Vehicles tractors and it's kind
of cool to be able to see General water usage and other areas of the property so we've had this in
place for over a week it might also be close to about two weeks at this point my thoughts just
from the two weeks this is a really cool system it is not overly fancy it's not got anything that
I have not found myself looking at checking and being appreciative that we do have and overall a
really good package and system for our garden plus general water usage so if I had to pick what my
top three things are that I like about this system first and foremost is that the water timer can be
controlled without the app I can walk over there I can push the little gray button turn the water
on and off however I want to that's very nice number two on that top three list would be the
fact I can easily go into the app and if we got a lot of rain today set it to skip or use the
function rain delay and not water the garden the next morning that is really nice really handy and
it is a great way not to just waste the water when it's not needed and then feature number three are
the soil sensors those have been really handy in measuring soil temperature and soil humidity
we have been able to see as the humidity spikes with watering how quickly it's depleted back down
to 20 30 percent gauge how much water we need to use not use and also add The Mulch on top
for water retention and for temperature control that's been very handy if anything out here you
can turn the water on and off you can see your plants as you water them but being able to gauge
the soles moisture level is not native to a human skill as is the temperature of soil not very easy
to do with our little temperature probes I guess we have on our hands so in a roundabout way have
the sensors is really handy there there we have it guys there is a look at how we have put the
rain Point Smart Plus Garden system in use and in place in our garden the things we like about
it and of everything the two little tweaks I wish I had temperature adjustment within the sensors
I feel like that can probably be done through a firmware update so who knows maybe there'll
be an update on the app or firmware and we'll get that fixed or in the future and that would be just
perfect overall if you've got any questions or comments leave them for us down below otherwise we
appreciate you guys watching as always take care and we'll see you guys next time on the homestead