Rain skip after rain?

It rained for two days straight. On the third day, irrigation turned on. Can this be prevented?

Hey @Moebious-

What type of schedule are you using? If it is Fixed or Flex Monthly, do you have the Rain Skip Weather Intelligence feature enabled? Another thing to check is that your selected weather station is reporting precipitation. You can do this by going to “Change Weather Station” and selecting the link under your selected station. If you would like, feel free to post the link here and I can check it out!

McKynzee :rachio:

1 Like

@mckynzee I just encountered the same problem as @Moebious with my Rachio. In my case, everything looked good in the Netatmo, Meteoware and PSW configurations, but the data was not being collected by the Rachio.

After I did a power cycle on my Netatmo, I could see the newly reported data in PSW, but no history preceding the recycled power. I assume that PSW builds the history as the data is collected, rather than pulling that from the Netatmo, at least I hope that is the case, and not a problem. I’ll have to watch to see if it builds a history, and also make sure it continues to work properly in days to come. I have no idea when the data dropout occurred. Thanks for your reference to the “Change Weather Station” key to accessing the actual collected data.

One point that you made that confused me was about the “Rain Skip Weather Intelligence Feature”. I can’t find that anywhere on the Rachio setup. Does it exist only on version 2’s?

Hey @vicw-

When you say the Rachio was not collecting the data, was it being reported to PWS? You may have answered this question but I’m a bit lost, I apologize!

Rain Skip is available on any hardware- however if you are using a flex schedule you will not see this option as this intelligence is inherently enabled on flex and cannot be disabled. If you are not using flex, there is a support article here outlining how to find that feature and configure it! Let me know if that helps.

McKynzee :rachio:

@mckynzee Sorry that I wasn’t clear in my description. The data didn’t make it to PWS. Apparently the Netatmo wasn’t providing it, until I did the Power Cycle, forcing it to reboot.

I’m on a Flex Schedule, so based on your explanation, I wouldn’t see it listed on the Rachio.

@vicw Got it- thank you! When you power cycled the Netatmo, did the data that had been missing backfill, or was it just lost? Checking the Netatmo support site, it seems like the best guess for the data dropout would be a loss of wifi for a bit.

@mckynzee The Netatmo retained all of its historical data. My guess on the PWS data capture is that it deals with live data only, and that it will build its own history of live data that it received after the Netatmo recycle.

I kind of doubt the WiFi loss theory, but I’ll be monitoring the results carefully going forward to see if there is any correlation. For now, I’ll hope it was a one-off glitch in the Netatmo that caused it to stop forwarding data.

1 Like

@vicw That’s disappointing that PWS does not backfill that data… I wonder if there is any way to change that. And let me know, I can’t think of what would cause it other than WiFi, hopefully it was a one time glitch!

@vicw - I’ve seen a similar situation happen with a neighbor’s PWS when we lost power for several hours. In that event, the PWS base station reset to zero. If this is really important, then I might suggest a small UPS (uninterruptible power supply) (e.g. APC BackUPS) for the WiFi router, weather station base and internet modem.

1 Like

@DLane You made a good point regarding extensive outages. I do have a several UPS units on critical circuits, to avoid short term network outages, plus a whole house generator, to prevent extended ones, and hopefully I didn’t encounter the PWS scenario you described due to power loss. I really don’t know how long the Netatmo was not sending data via Meteoware to PWS and ultimately to Rachio - it could have been months, especially with the Rachio paused through the winter months. It isn’t something that I expected to happen. Now that this occurred, I’ll be watching it daily to make sure everything continues to work properly. Of course, I won’t be able to check it every several hours to avoid the possibility of PWS resetting, but I should be able to act to prevent the Rachio from running any wasteful watering cycles in the future, while the PWS history is built again.

@mckynzee It’s unfortunate that PWS apparently doesn’t pull out prior history from the Netatmo. Since I recycled the Netatmo yesterday, I do now see continuing data in PWS today, and it is building a new history from the restoral point. I can understand how it would be much more difficult for PWS to extract preceding historical data from a variety of sources, with different structures, and I doubt that could be changed.

The reason that I most suspect the Netatmo unit as the problem, is that it has a slightly checkered history. There were times over the last couple of years when it would fail to report within the Netatmo app data path for extended periods, and only a power recycle would restore full operation. Ironically, I haven’t seen that problem for at least 10 months, and I was hopeful that any instability was gone. This problem is a bit different, since it only affected the Meteoware/PWS/Rachio pathway, but similar in that once the data stops, it doesn’t start up again without a kick from me. I’ll watch carefully, and report back if it occurs again.

1 Like

@mckynzee Aha! I just discovered that PWS didn’t really clear out the entire historical data for my weather station.

I just hadn’t stepped back far enough in PWS to see the old data. The Netatmo appears to have stopped sending data on about May 18th of 2016, which is about the last time I experienced the other Netatmo problem that I mentioned previously. That is reassuring - while the data gap in PWS between May 18, 2016 and yesterday morning is still empty in PWS, the prior old historical data and my new data still exists.

2 Likes

@vicw That is reassuring!! Still strange the Netatmo stopped reporting, but hopefully whatever glitch that occurred is since resolved.

McKynzee :rachio:

@mckynzee Yes, I hope the problem is gone forever, but I’ll be watching carefully this time. Thanks for your help.

I noticed in Rachio today that it had somehow switched over to an alternate,nearby weatherforyou.com weather station as a data source in the interim. I don’t know how long ago that happened, or if it deduced the ongoing lack of data, and made the switch by program design, but that may have lessened the excessive watering during the down period on my station data.

UPDATE: I just looked at the Archive of the data in weatherforyou.com that Rachio was using. It is a carbon copy of the data from my weather station, and suffers from the same huge gap in data as mine, so that wouldn’t have helped any.

What is netatmo?

Never mind. I looked it up on the web. Personally, i get my weather data from an airport that is 2 miles from my house.

1 Like

Yes, I had the same situation, with an airport weather station 2 miles away, but we live in the Southeast, and rainfall amounts often vary dramatically between our home and that weather station. As an example, one day last week, we got 0.3" of rain, and the airport reported 0.01".

After installing the Rachio, using the airport weather station for input, and then experiencing a number of dramatically divergent rainfall reports, I installed my own Netatmo station, and I’m really glad to have it.

3 Likes

Good deal.

I experienced the same issue as the OP here this past weekend. I’m using the Flex Monthly schedule, and I have the Rain Skip feature enabled for .125". It rained Friday and Saturday, and the local weather station (within 2 miles of my house) was reporting rain during this time as well (it shows .93" accumulation on Fri/Sat). However, I woke up this morning to see that the system watered all zones for the full scheduled times.

Does the Rachio not record these amounts? I’m confused as this device is supposed to save water, but clearly today’s watering was a total waste as the ground was still fully saturated.