Rain skip when there's no rain

Archive
1

Lately it’s been in the 90s and 100s where I live in Northern California, and this morning for the second time recently my Rachio had a rain skip. I do not use a rain sensor, just the nearest station: KAUN, which AFACT reported no rain.

Two questions:

  • Any idea why these rain skips have been happening and how I can avoid them?
  • How can I manually force my schedule (with all of the appropriate timings for each zone) to run when I see there’s a rain skip that shouldn’t have happened?

Edit: It looks like this station did record 3 inches of rain which is an obvious error:

http://w1.weather.gov/obhistory/KAUN.html

The problem is that there aren’t many stations in the Sacramento area that record rainfall so I’m very limited.

Thanks

2

All you need is one. How far away is the closest non-PWS station?

3

Closest is ~18 miles, but it’s slightly up above the snowline (I am not). I’m not sure how that would effect precipitation reporting in the winter.

4

Yeah, I could see the dilemma in that case. I’m guessing that you might be better off using a local station but then buying and using a rain sensor. As I don’t have a rain sensor myself I can’t say for sure that would be the way to go. Hopefully others can chime in that have more experience.

5

Hey @rachiuser -

Are there any close PWS’s? If you want to post them here, I can check out their consistency. Many personal weather stations are pretty reliable data sources.

Is this a common issue you have with KAUN? There is a chance it was a one time mistake and it doesn’t happen again!

McKynzee

6

I’m getting the opposite problem of not getting rain skips when the threshold has been exceeded. I’m linked to my own personal weather station MID_E7812. You can see in the Schedule Updates there was no skip on July 26th.

image.png2560×1400 637 KB

Here is the weather history for my station on that day on Weather Underground. I received over 3/4 in of rain.

image.png2560×1400 214 KB

Any ideas?

Damon

7

Hi McKynzee,

KAUN seemed fine until this summer when it reported rain twice in the middle of a heat wave. A few of the PWS’s near me include:

http://www.pwsweather.com/obs/archive/yest/SERRANOEDH.html



Thanks