Rachio 3 app use of Wunderground confusion

I have MY OWN weather station on my roof (Ambient WS5000 if it matters) setup in my Rachio app and really don’t understand the purpose. It seems to do nothing to control weather related watering, Maybe I am missing something in the app to set it up?

I constantly get “Next Schedule cancelled” delays because my set number of inches (1/2") of rain is PREDICTED within 24hrs. 90% of the time it NEVER EVEN drizzles.in the next 24hrs and the schedule doesn’t run. That is “normal” here in central FL. It could, and has poured 3 blocks away but the sun shines here with zero rain.

However what NEVER happens is when we get one of those Florida 2" of rain in 1 hour" afternoon storms every few days during “rainy season” (now) which my rain gauge clearly shows 2" of rain in my app(s) the next morning’s schedule does NOT get cancelled

Isn’t the purpose of setting up a weather station to use it’s “real time” live data to, among other things, not run a schedule 4 hours after a 2" of rain deluge?

What am I missing?

Thanks

What schedule type are you running? Can you confirm that Rachio is seeing the correct information?

As for forecasting, your weather station obviously doesn’t have weather prediction capabilities, so Rachio uses a service for that. Weather men/women are the only people I know that can get their job wrong over 50% of the time and still have a job, so…

To help out, you can raise the threshold. I think default is .25", and you can bump that up so that you don’t get as many forecasted skips.

1 Like

Not sure if you are still around. As you can see I haven’t been on here for quite a while but still having same issue but pretty much gave up on it . I have a simple basic 2 day a week schedule. Nothng fancy.

I am not looking for weather PREDICTION just the system seeing the actual DATA from MY CONNECTED WEATHER STATION through Wunderground that shows at 6PM MON we had 3.5 inches of rain and my next watering was scheduled for 4AM TUESDAY (10 hrs later). I would have assumed that since it is using my weather station DATA which clearly showed 3.5" of rain 10 hrs ago that it would NOT water 10hrs later.

Obviously I am missing what the purpose of the connection with my WS5000 through Wunderground provides. I “sorta” solved it by connecting one of those old fashioned cork rain sensors outside but that didn’t answer my question of what connecting to my WS should provide.

Can’t get rid of me that easy…

What kind of schedules are you running? Are you absolutely sure that Rachio is pointed to your weather station in the app, and if you click on it, you should be able to see the data being reported. Is it in fact reporting the data correctly to Rachio?

If you are running fixed schedules, it will utilize the data and skip watering for some period of time, but honestly I don’t know how long it would skip, just the day, the next day, etc…there is also a saturation skip, do you have that enabled? That might allow Rachio to skip longer if on fixed schedules. I don’t run fixed schedules unless I am in winter overseeding time, so I’m not as familiar with them.

If you are running flex daily schedules, assuming that the data is actually making it to WU and then to Rachio, this absolutely would allow it to skip as long as needed for the soil to “dry out” (within reason. Rachio only registers a max of 110% soil capacity).