Lots of rain yesterday but Rachio does not reflect it

Plenty of thunderstorms yesterday (7/25). Had two questions:

Q1: I was puzzled on why it watered yesterday when there was rain in the forecast, unless the forecast changed after 4am, which is when my schedules run?

Q2: It watered another zone today (7/26), even though the lawn was soaked yesterday. So I opened up the app and was surprised to see 0.00 in of precipitation recorded for yesterday.

Digging around, it looks like the precip yesterday disappeared. Is it the way the weather station I’m using reports it, and/or how Aeris interprets it?

Forecast as of yesterday night shows 0.39 in of precip:

But today that 0.39 in of precip disappeared:

Link to MID_C5896:

http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/wxpage.cgi?call=CW5896&last=240

http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/wx.cgi?call=CW5896

Interesting data point I noticed, the “rain 24hr in” value doesn’t seem to be populated, so at the cutover when the “rain mn in” was zeroed out, the precip disappeared. Is this the cause of the issues above?

Thanks!

@Lucas @franz

I’ve opened a ticket with Aeris and will let you know what we find out. From the station reporting website does look like Aeris is not relaying the precipitation from 7/24 (almost an inch).

:cheers:

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@jleh

From Aeris, this is a known issue with some CWOP stations.

The station is sending the data as Precip since local midnight. Unfortunately, this is the value that NOAA is not redistributing for “APRSWXNET/CWOP” stations. We have requests in to add this, but as of the end of June, we were told there was no immediate option for them to redistribute these values.

Moar information…

One easy way to verify is to query:
MESOWEST STATION INTERFACE

You can pass the ID (minus the MID_) in the above URL.

This station is an APRSWXNET/CWOP station, and only precip since local midnight is being sent, which NOAA unfortunately is not redistributing.

At this time the only option is to use another station…

:cheers:

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Thanks for looking into this @franz. This station C5896 is closest to me, but since it’s no good for Aeris/Rachio’s purposes, I’ll go back to using a different station that is further away (E7923), but does report both values. I had switched to C5896 because recently Rachio started showing the “No Recorded Precip Data” message for E7923.

I suppose I could also try my luck and see if the owner of C5896 would want to try upgrading his firmware :smile: (as discovered by @petercw2)

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If you end up without a viable weather station then connect your controller to ifttt and use weather underground to set a rain delay of some sort.

Oops old post

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