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Yes, I have a Channel Vision door camera and it all runs over a single cat-6 cable. I used a cheap video balun on the video feed and am running everything about 75ft.

Yes, you can schedule the watering, if needed based on the water balance, for a certain time of day and certain days of the week. There is even/odd, certain # of days, and certain days of the week scheduling available. There are also weather rules that can be enabled that prevent watering if it...

No, that is one way to do it. For that type of system, there probably wouldn't be any ET calculations required although you could do that and then use the moisture sensors as a override. The way the water balance / ET systems work is the amount of water leaving the soil is calculated from...

You don't have to use individual moisture sensors, just a central rainfall gauge. The components of my system are a CQC server with a Weather Channel driver, a Rain8Net Pro irrigation controller and driver, an Irrigation Scheduler driver, and a Davis Vantage Vue weather station and driver. As I...

At some point, you can't model every detail, but as you say, much of the variation tends to get averaged out. In case it doesn't, most of the settings of the system are configurable so you can tweak zones based on experience. For example, by default the system waters when the water balance of a...

Yes, it is based on the Penman-Monteith equation. A good resource for the calculations can be found here: http://www.fao.org/docrep/X0490E/x0490e00.htm#Contents I'm not sure if the ET calculation code from my driver would be too valuable as it is written in CML, uses CML library functions, and...

The CQC irrigation scheduler which I use and wrote does manage each zone independently. You can specify the parameters for each zone including soil type, vegetation type, sprinkler flow rate, sun exposure, slope, etc. The water balance is maintained for each zone based on rainfall received...

FWIW, I've been running a ET based water balance system starting earlier this year and found it to work quite well. It turns out that since you water a whole zone at a time anyway, then you just have to model each zone based on the most stringent conditions within the zone to make sure that...

The CQC irrigation scheduler can work with the Elk if you are using the digital outputs to control the sprinkler valves.

There is now a Prestige IAQ thermostat (9421) that communicates with a supplied EIM (Equipment interface module). The IAQ has more advanced features beyond the Prestige HD thermostat and I believe the EIM allows connection via the Enviracom bus. Honeywell makes a serial interface module for...

Warren Lohoff at WGL suggested that the problem may be the frequency of polling. The CQC driver polls at 3 second intervals and that may be too fast to allow the background timer actions to kick in. He said to try a 1 minute poll interval which is about what it appears mcsSprinklers is doing...

I looked at the CQC driver code and when it periodically polls, it just issues a status request.

Just FYI, there is no more CQC yearly maintenance fee as of a couple of days ago.

Three reasons I'm considering it: 1) Infiltration as you mentioned. 2) HVAC and ductwork in the attic that would be exposed to lower temperatures. 3) History of pests - squirrels etc so existing fiberglass is soiled and sealing might keep them out. Price including removing existing blown...

I've been looking into spray foam in my attic and would be interested in discussing as well. My biggest unknown right now is the question of fumes / chemical sensitivity that have been reported by some.

Some of the non-US heat pump manufacturers have some fairly impressive products. Outside of the U.S., they have been building modulating systems with high performance for a number of years (they are way ahead of the U.S. in this area). They can run effectively into some pretty low temperatures...

Yes, the heating capacity of the system should at least be equal to the BTU loss at the design temps. It would be interesting to know what design temps they were using. From what I've seen, on the heating side they sometimes even oversize by a small amount as a safety factor. On the cooling...

A properly designed system runs at 100% of capacity when the outdoor temperature reaches the design temperature. Typically, a Manual J calc is done that determines BTU loss at the design temperatures. Manual J suggests the 97.5 percentile outdoor design temperature for cooling, 2.5 percentile...

One of the nice things about the 9421 is that it is one of the most highly recommended thermostats out there even if you don't want to be able to communicate with it. The code in the SourceForge project appears to have been written by someone at Honeywell originally which sets it apart from...

There is an Enviracom SourceForge project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/enviracom/ In there, one of the files appears to be a brief API doc and a C interface written by someone at Honeywell: http://sourceforge.net/projects/enviracom/...pi-orig.tar.gz/