Something is Off w/Precipitation

Ok. It rained cats and dogs in my town all day Saturday. On Sunday(Mother’s Day), it rained and hailed periodically. When I look at the Rachio moisture graph it has recorded ZERO preciptitation and the moisture level is below Zero. I looked at weather underground for another station close by and it reports 4" of precipitation. The only thing that saved me from watering last night is that my Rain sensor is still active. Could Rachio be ignoring the preciptation checks when the rain sensor is active? It has me scheduled for heavy irrigation everyday this week. This will be a waste of water. It looks like the weather station did not report from 5/12 - 5/14. IDoesn’t Rachio fall back to the nearest NOAA as a backup? If not, Id like to request a new feature allowing the user to set a primary and secondary station. Feels like i am babysiting the weather stations and weather forecasts. I am going to try and find another weather station near my home. But I think that even if I changed the weather station now, Rachio would not change the watering schedule since it was a past event. It will also miss the precip amounts. Is this correct?

I think I saw in another post someone asking to tie the rain delay to the rain sensor. This is sounding more sensible to me now as a user selectable option. It would be if rain sensor activated, delay any one of the current manually selectable days. I originally didnt respond to the other post because I figured well, Rachio is forced to wait for my sensor to dry out. But given this situation, this feature is also needed. You can smarten it up by checking the weather and for sensor dry out. At this point, it feels like a double edged sword. I wanted my Rachio to be a set and forget it. The other weird thing I show no water savings since using my Rachio. When should I expect to see calculated savings?

@garyjnj1

I had the development review that station (MID_47N9) and it doesn’t look to be reporting any precipitation. I would recommend choosing another station.

This article might help you make a selection.

:cheers:

Hi Franz, something is really a miss then. The. PWS station I have been on is mid_c0479 The Gladsone family. It is 2…5 miles away from my home. I never selected the station you are referring to. I now see the one you mention it the graphic that i posted too. Please check my history and let me know when/how it changed. The only other station that I use is the NOAA KSMQ. That is 9 miles away, hence the Gladstone selection.

Hi franz, any update on this?

If that PWS had gone offline (the one you chose), we would have fallen back to the next closest one. That’s my best explanation for the other PWS. Let us know if you see any other discrepancies and I can have the development team review.

Thanks and have a great day!

:cheers:

I see… In that case the first discrepancy that we have is the fall back logic. That is, the PWS chosen was a non-precipitation reporting station instead of one that had precipitation capabilities. We should never fall back to a station that does not have active precipitation reporting online. From a programming standpoint, if there is no way to discriminate between precipitation reporting sites and non-reporting sites, the fallback should always be to the nearest active NOAA site. Ideally, the fallback site should be a preselectable user option.

(Just thought of this, how about installing a filters option for PWS users such that all non-precipitation reporting stations will not show as selectable? )

The second discrepancy is that since precipitation levels are so critical to Rachio system functionality and purported EPA water savings, a pop-up or email notification should be sent to the user whenever a PWS or NOAA site failure & site change occurs. Presuming that this is not a frequent occurence(i.e., not an annoyance), the user could also be granted a pop-up option to select the desired station at that time. For users of the PWS feature, this could be a user selectable option that can be turned on or off.

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I love these feature requests @garyjnj1, I think we could be more helpful to users while selecting and maintaining a valid weather station. It’s so important and lots of things can go wrong there!

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Ok. I’ve been on station KSMQ NOAA station since my last reporting on this issue. This station is located in Somerville, NJ and is 9 miles away from my home. I mentioned before, The Gladstone PWS is much closer to my home(2.5mi) but since Franz mentioned it is not reporting precipitation, with much hesitation I switched to KSMQ.

We had a considerable amount of rain this past week. As such, I reviewed my Rachio graph today. To my surprise, almost all of the Zones are showing zero % moisture. Because of this, the system scheduled to water last night. The cycle was skipped (and rightfully so) due to the fact that my rain sensor is still activated. If it were not for my rain sensor, again, I would be wasting water. After further research and looking into the station KSMQ and Weather Underground precipitation reports on I found that the station only reports 0.2 inches of precipitation this week. This is WAY off from what I actually received. I know this because the amount of inches of rain was maxed out on my Rain Sensor’s graph and because the sensor is still active. So, I looked at Weather Underground’s report for another station that is literally less than 2 miles away from my home (KSNSOMERSET20 in Ukranian Village Somerset) and it correctly shows over 1 inch of rain fall this week. This matches what I’m seeing on my Rain Sensor’s graph.

Now I am in a conundrum, I dont have a Weather Station to choose that reports precipitation values that are representative of my location. My Rain Sensor works, but I show no water accumilations due to the rain fall in my region. I show no savings when the Rain Sensor is activated. My Rachio zones are being scheduled based on weather conditions that are occuring at homes in another town as opposed to what is happening at my home.
Not sure what to do but I am about to give up on this technology.