Very happy Sprite user for a year or so - but at this location I have a limitation I need to resolve... and thinking upgrading to Spark - will it resolve the issue ????

So I have installed the Sprite in a rental property - wanting to ensure that the tennents actually look after the garden and look after the place - and one of those things I have done is put in automated sprinklers and drippers to gardens to esnure that the garden gets watered and the grass and plants dont die in the harsh australian climate...

But what I found with a set of tennents is that they did not bother getting or setting up a wifi network. So the sprite had nothing to connect to and hence ran no programs - no connectivity / no watering....

So the Spark has a backup program apparantly.... I assume this means the Spark would have memory and know a schedule of sorts... Of course without connectivity there is no checking on rain schedules etc... Thats fine...  But does it mean if I set up a program to water the lawn for 30 minutes every second day while it had internet connectivity.. If the internet disapears will that mean the program will continue to drive the solonoids at appropriate time and hence carry on watering the garden.

What is the limitation - of cpurse internet features would not be available - is it only manual schedules that would operate - just on time schedules - would it run only for a week or could it run indefinately - or even just a year - until the internet returned...

What is the backup - what is the limitations - how does it work - what are the features !

Similarly how does the faulty valve detection work... Is it just a measure of resistance or what how does this feature work...  If the spark had the capability of measuring water flow (like some controllers do) - then it would be a great feature in measuring the volume of water consumed and of course this would also be an easy way of measuring valve detection... Flow with valve closed = leak somewhere and No flow with valve open = blockage or solonoid issue..... But that is not the feature - so trying to understand functionally and technically what the valve detection is....

Thanks