Are you using a firmware like ESPEasy or writing your own code? I’m just curious. I’m about to scrap my RFM69HW Arduinos for ESP8266s and have only just begun looking at how to set up the ESP.
Here is a thought that might make it work with the sleeps.
In my mind, you have two problems with any wireless but even more so with devices that control something as impactful as irrigation. I assume you are on a well but you still don’t want a valve to be stuck ON unbeknownst to you. For me, if a sprinkler zone were stuck on for a day it could be nearly financially ruinous (we have some of the most expensive water in the world where I live).
- Feedback - you need confirmation that the irrigation is ON or OFF
- Timely control - being able to cut the flow as soon as possible when necessary
Unfortunately, there is no way to do both of the above in a battery efficient manner. So we need to come up with a compromise between responsiveness and feedback and battery usage.
So let’s say you implement the night-time detection and put the ESP to sleep when it is dark. Though it occurs to me you could just send a message with dawn and dusk times to the ESPs and let it reset it’s internal clocks (it won’t be super easy but if they publish a heartbeat with battery remaining and up time your OH can calculate the offset on the uptime to go to sleep and when to wake up the wifi). Anyway, after that let’s have it wake up every 10 minutes.
When it wakes up it will pull down any messages and process those and send the heartbeat message and if it were to turn on the irrigation send a confirmation that the water has been turned on. I’d recommend keeping the wifi on whenever the irrigation is running so you can immediately turn it off. But if you do not, know that it won’t be until the next wake up period that the off command will be received and processed.
So the big compromise is the addition of some additional messages that need to be exchanged when the ESP does wake up, keeping the wifi on while the water is running to maintain something closer to positive control of the irrigation, and turning the irrigation on can take up to 10 minutes. And despite this, I would still recommend that instead of sending a simple ON message you send how long the valve should remain on as part of the message so even if it loses wifi or something else goes wrong the water will be turned off (unless the valve or ESP itself dies for some reason).
On the OH side, use the off message from the ESP to trigger the next ESP, though it can take up to ten minutes for that valve to turn on too. But the positive commands coming back from devices is what will let you control the transition from one zone to the next rather than timers running in OH.
You will have to think hard about all the edge cases and error cases and how you want to handle those.