How did I end up with two bays open at the same time?

Question

Why did the next bay open although the previous one was already watering?

Answer

In some cases, battery, cabling or device failures might cause multiple bays to open at the same time due to auto-skipping, which might cause low water pressure while irrigating and other unexpected results. You'll need to close these faulty bays manually.

Overview

A schedule may fail for a number of reasons, including:

• Communications - the field unit (or gateway) dropped off the cellular or radio network
• Battery - the field unit (or gateway) has shutdown due to low battery level
• Cabling - the device is unreachable due to faulty cabling
• Device - pump, actuator or valve report a failure (i.e actuator jammed or pump stopped on high pressure)
• Congestion - where there are large radio networks deployed, or some communications reliability issues within a radio network, messages between the cloud platform and field unit may be getting delayed. 

Auto skip is triggered in these cases and the system tries to skip to the next item. The motivation for auto skip in pressurised irrigation systems is to avoid pump shutdown or a burst pipe. The motivation for auto skip in surface irrigation systems is to avoid a channel blowing out.

This can lead to two bays being open at the same time because the system will be unable to close the first bay and you will need to close the faulty bays manually.

The best way to avoid this situation is to make sure:

• Gateway units are located at good cellular reception.
• Any 900MHz radio field units have line of sight to the Gateway unit.  Crops and other foliage that grow over the antenna height will break radio communications. 
• All antennas are undamaged.
• Gateway antennas are installed according to the guidelines.
• Field units are fully charged and there are no battery issues. 
• All devices are working and cabling is undamaged.
• The number of radio nodes in the network is limited to avoid congestion.