Best pws to use in orange county

What is the best pws to use in orange county. I tried to pick several and getting frustrated when there is “no precipitation data”. I feel like I have to manually skip which defeats the purpose of this controller.

Which model rachio are you using and what zip code are you located in? I ask because Orange County (CA) is pretty broad from inland vs coastal.

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Gen 2. 92620.northwood Pointe.

You seem to have a boatload of pws to choose from near your neighborhood. I only have two in my immediate neighborhood!

When they report 0 rain it doesn’t matter if it have 15.

Sorry to hear. Trying to help you. Based on the weather underground app, they all seem to collect data on precipitation. If you zoom in the map, more pws locations show up. Where did you see that it didn’t pick up precipitation data? Can you include a screenshot?

Here’s the one closest to my house. It rained plenty the 2nd half of the month. Here’s also ksna which sna is the airport so not sure why they don’t report rain.

You know what. There are multiple pws stations much closer to your home within 1 mile. If the nearest one in rachio says 3+ miles away, it means some of these pws needs to be manually added to rachio database for the rachio 2.

  1. Download the weather underground app for your phone.

  2. Browse for a pws near your home. Get its station ID number.

  3. Request that pws to be registered in rachio in this thread: Adding WUnderground Station to Rachio with Gen 2

  4. Wait within a day or two and you should be able to select that pws in your rachio app.

  5. If I were you, I’d request to add multiple pws near your home to that thread I pasted above.

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Just to add my 2 cents:
Rachio map shows different types of stations based on what controller you have. Gen 1 and 2 controllers use aerisweather, which owns pwsweather, as the data source, while Gen 3 use Weather Underground.

While it is possible to use a wider selection of weather stations from weather underground with Gen 2 controllers, as @Tintn00 has mentioned, you would need to do a bit of homework.

A good place to start is at wundermap.com, there you can find your location and narrow down the chose to show only stations with rainfall data. In order to do so, you would need to click “All Layers” button on the top right of the map and choose “Precipitation” Layer under the top “Weather Stations” section.

Unfortunately, only station of note I would consider in your area is KCAIRVIN129 (link), here is a write up (link) on what I look for in weather station. As examples of bad stations KCAIRVIN11 (link) has registered 55 inches of rain in Feb 8th (last time it has reported any rain); and KCAIRVIN72 (link) has seem to have forgotten how to reset the daily rain totals this month (last month it seemed to work ok though, maybe a temporary issue).

In any case, once found, you can ask to have the station added to pwsweather, and thereby make it available to Rachio. I’ve done so for the …129 station here (link), so if you want to give it a try, just look for PWS_KCAIRVIN129 in a couple of hours. If there is another station you would prefer to use, just ask, it’s not strictly necessary to make the request in the thread @Tintn00 has linked to, but doing it there makes it less likely that your request will be overlooked.

Cheers,
Gene

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Fascinating. I have Rachio 2 with weather intelligence plus (Costco). I assume mine uses weather underground?

@Tintn00, yep, Gen 2 from Costco is the unicorn of the group. These get weather underground support naively, so no need to first transfer data to pwsweather. :+1:

Cheers,
Gene

I’ll add a third cent, as I actually have a paucity of PWS locations in the Savannah area and had the same problem as you. The nearest PWS if just over a mile away which on the coast and this area it may as well be a hundred. It is better than when I first installed the GEN2 a few years ago and it was 8 miles away. What I did was go old fashioned and installed a rain sensor to avoid overwatering which was killing my grass. It is a cheap fix, easy to install and provides a low tech backup to the PWS to at least prevent overwatering.

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