Basically, I was super tired getting home from an event last night and didn’t even notice the water hadn’t stopped flowing normally. It’s quiet so I don’t normally hear it.
Apparently at some point a couple hours in a fitting in my drip setup blew, flooding my peppers planter entirely and in the process burning through nearly 4000 liters of water before I caught it on my way out the door to work this morning.
I’ve since learned there’s a Z2M command to start watering on a timer, but I didn’t know that before and trusted Whisper to not fuck this up. My fault.
Don’t think my water bill company will be amenable to it. I’ll call and ask but, fuck.
To prevent things like this from happening, you can create alarms in Grafana to notify you of unusual behaviour. Something along the lines of “If water consumption in the last 6 hours is > 10L / hour, fire the alarm and notify me”.
I like to think of stuff like that as an error culture: errors are bound to happen, be it a wrong Whisper transcript, a broken pipe, etc, and that’s okay. You can’t never be fully sure you are error-free. What you can do is create a culture that can catch these errors in their early stages, without having to wait, say, a whole month for the water bill to be astronomically expensive for you to say “Hey, something’s wrong” (that wasn’t the case here, but bear with me).
Reporting like that really is something I should be doing more of. I think about it lots at work and when I go home I guess I often turn off that part.