Got my new weather station with solar and UV sensors up and running on Weather Underground yesterday. Today I signed up for PWSWeather.com which Rachio supports and set my weather station up there. Within minutes the data was visible on PWSWeather.com AND IN THE RACHIO APP!!! Only issue is although I am sending solar and UV data I don’t see it displayed (or even a column for it) on PWSWeather.com (works fine on WU) so I’m worried Rachio isn’t getting the data. My understanding per franz is that Rachio leverages solar data if you have it to more accurately calculate evaporation so I really want Rachio to have the data. Any help?
Quick note: my pwsweather.com data is temporarily stopped as I was getting some kind of network conflict from the meteobridge that sends the data there, until I have time to troubleshoot this weekend I’m back to just updating weather underground. My original question still stands. Thanks all!
Still hoping someone has any info on solar data on pwsweather? It seems that CWOP may carry the solar data and Rachio I believe supports CWOP so perhaps that is the way I should go?
Ah, but I DO have it… so since I set up my weather station for the express purpose of aiding the accuracy of my Iro it seems CWOP is the way to go so the solar data is accurate. The Meteobridge fully supports sending data to all these sites so it should be fairly easy to just sign up for one vs. the other. Thanks again!
Interesting… so now I have to see if CWOP has an API to redirect the Weather Underground PWS data.
Update: it is interesting that the PWSweather UI doesn’t report UV/solar - their API does have entries for it and I am submitting them - just not sure if they are stored by PWS weather.
ex - this is the POST string I use for pwsweather.com: PWSPOST="ID=$PWSID&PASSWORD=$PWSPASS&dateutc=$PWSDATEUTC&winddir=$PWSWINDDIR&windspeedmph=$PWSWINDSPEEDMPH&windgustmph=$PWSWINDGUSTMPH&tempf=$PWSTEMPF&rainin=$PWSRAININ&dailyrainin=$PWSDAILYRAININ&baromin=$PWSBAROMIN&dewptf=$PWSDEWPTF&humidity=$PWSHUMIDITY&solarradiation=$PWSSOLARRADIATION&UV=$PWSUV&softwaretype=wu_pws_ver1.0&action=updateraw"
The presense of the &solarradiation= and &UV= tells me that PWS weather is capable of capturing it. Maybe it’s just not reported in their UI but it’s there anyways?
@franz, can you give any details about how Rachio retreives data from pwsweather? Is there a wget/curl request that we could dissect to see if the UV/solar data is actually there?
I asked the pwsweather folks about UV/SOLAR. Their response:
Hi John,
The UV and solar radiation data is being accepted and stored on the system but the station pages haven’t been formatted to display it. It’s one of the things on the list for the next maintenance update
So it’s in there, is Rachio using it if a PWSweather station is selected?
I know we are in the weeds here and this is the kind of stuff contributing to the support burden but I’m assuming if pwsweather doesn’t display the data (solar) you guys aren’t getting it from them right now even if they have it. Bottom line is I’m hoping you can tell me which service to use if I want to be certain Rachio is using my actual solar data and not interpolating. I’m happy to use the proper one I just need to know which support that. Thanks.
Ok, so if we have a PWS that reports UV/solar, or if we want to use data from a Weather Underground station that reports UV/solar, we first have to get it into a CWOP station before Rachio can pick it up?
I wrote a script to ship data from Weather Underground to pwsweather.com thinking that Rachio would use whatever data was associated with the pwsweather.com station selected in the Rachio UI. Sounds like that’s not the case.
Happy to try and do the same thing with CWOP… any pointers on how to create a CWOP station and if they have an API to push updates to?
That is my current understanding. If you reach out to Aeris they could answer to whether or not PWSWeather supports that. I have not seen that data come through PWS_* stations, but I also didn’t look at our entire data set.
If Aeris sends us the data, we will use it, irregardless of what type of weather station it comes from.
I’m not an expert by any means, this is the latest article I can find on the subject. If you find anything more recent please let me know.
