Spread irrigation over multiple cycles a day

[JoshuaLampert]

First of all thanks for the great integration!
Due to pressure reduction of my pump, I cannot irrigate for longer than a couple of minutes in a row. Therefore, I would like to split up the irrigation time calculated by Smart Irrigation into multiple, say 3, cycles a day. For simplicity let's say the start times are fixed for each day. Now I would like to create an automation, which gets triggered at these start times and runs the irrigation for as long as Smart Irrigation calculated, but not longer then a fixed number of seconds (say N seconds). (This means I set a delay of the minimum of states("sensor.[zone_name"]) and N). After the delay the switch is turned off and I want to reset the bucket appropriately. However, I only want the bucket to be reset by the amount that was actually irrigated. One way to achieve this, which I thought of, is:

1. If states("sensor.smart_irrigation_[zone_name"]) is smaller than or equal to N, I just reset the bucket with smart_irrigation.reset_bucket.
2. If states("sensor.smart_irrigation_[zone_name"]) is bigger than N, I want to reset the irrigation time by N seconds. As I understand, the time cannot be set directly, but only the bucket. So one possibility would be to first calculate the new bucket value based on the old bucket value and the time of irrigation (N seconds) taking into account the size and throughput and then set the new bucket value via smart_irrigation.set_bucket. Then we also need to re-calculate the irrigation time with smart_irrigation.calculate_zone.

Would this be a feasible approach or is there any better alternative? This approach seems a bit cumbersome and a re-calculation with smart_irrigation.calculate_zone deletes the weather data, which might be undesirable in my use case. I have seen #458, which would provide an elegant solution to the problem, but I'm wondering whether there is a solution until this issue has been resolved.

[jeroenterheerdt]

We could maybe cheaply introduce a flag on calculate zone to allow you to control whether you want the data to be deleted or not.

[JoshuaLampert]

This sounds good. This means, you also don't see a more convenient solution to my issue? How difficult would it be to tackle #458? I think it would be a great improvement.