Rain yesterday / Water scheduled today

@boettcht‌ , we’ve been following up on this with our weather service Aeris, and we just heard that they found and fixed an issue that was causing some weather reports to show 0 precipitation on their end. (If you care, it apparently has to do with the way that NOAA was sending some updates).

Anyway, we believe this is the cause of most or all of the remaining “failed” rain delays that are erroneously showing 0 precipitation. The fix should be rolled out on their servers tomorrow.

Please let us know if you see any more issues, and we’ll keep working to make your Iro better!

Thanks for the followup, update & great work. I appreciate it. Got a WI status this morning of .236" this morning. My threshold is .25" :stuck_out_tongue: Looking forward to the WI reducing the run time to adjust to recent rain fall.

@coslor, @franz‌ I believe today was my first watering under the new version 1.7. I’m not sure if the Iro got bad data from the weather service again or something else is going on, but my schedule was run with a prediction of 0" inches as you can see from the attached pic that 0" isn’t likely. Maybe the fix from Aeris didn’t take. We are already having rain showers. Want to let you guys know so you could check it out.

Thanks.

@boettcht‌ Sure thing, will see what your weather station is saying.

@boettcht‌ Data data data! Ok, the weather station being used is KBOS. (http://w1.weather.gov/obhistory/KBOS.html) It is reporting zero inches for the observation today (which we used) since our assumption is an observation is more accurate, but the prediction for today from Aeris was 1.73 inches! It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t. We have a hard time figuring out if we want to use the observation or the prediction. We will modify to use whichever has a > precipitation to be safe. I’m sure this will adversely affect other rain delays, but hopefully less so than those it is helping.

Ok, wow, I wonder how they are so off. Funny enough I just received a flash flood warning for my location! Would I be better off enabling use weather from nearby personal weather stations? Do those make predictions or just report real/near real time data, does the Iro just check in with those at the time WI makes a decision to see if it actively raining? Not that a real time observation would help in this situation since the bulk of the rain hasn’t arrived yet. Hopefully this weird scenarios will help make the decision process in the future better. :slight_smile: As always keep up the great work.

Also this will most likely be my last watering for the season, blowing out the system and putting the Iro to sleep for the winter when a I get some free time. Looking forward to all the great improvements / feature adds over the winter!

@boettcht‌ I’d be wary of PWS, from what I have seen the data is questionable at best, unless it is yours and you know exactly how it was setup. We chose to default to non PWS based on what we were seeing. You can always turn it on and see… :slight_smile: I just pushed out those changes that will look at today observed and today predicted, and pick the better of the two. Ya, we will be building all kinds of awesome things over the winter, stay tuned. Thanks and have a great winter.

@boettcht‌ BTW - We now include all of the weather data in the email to make everything much more transparent :slight_smile:

Awesome, thanks! I personally would prefer it to pick the value that is greater for the amount rain predicted to fall and that prediction is off and we receive no rain I can always run the schedule manually. I can’t put the water back in after it is out. :stuck_out_tongue:

I really like the new email format!

I had the same situation as the original poster. Yesterday it rained a lot and this morning the sprinklers came on. I had seen these posts before and had switched to using a non-personal weather station in hopes that it would help, but apparently it did nothing to stop the watering cycle. Obviously it would be nice if it hadn’t watered, but what would also be nice is if there was an easy way to see (on the website or mobile device) the data that the system was going to use the next watering cycle. That way I could tell ahead of time if it was going to skip the cycle and if the weather station information was accurate. When the watering cycle is set to start before I am even up in the morning it would be nice to have an email or alert the night before, or some user specified time, with the projected watering time the next day.

@jalenhunter If you send an email to support@rachio.com they can review your account and make sure things look correct regarding your weather station, rain threshold settings, etc.

Thanks!

:beers:

Hi @jalenhunter, good morning. Thanks for reaching out.

As @franz mentioned, if you could email our support team [support@rachio.com] we will review your account with you. In your history feed, we log the observed and predicted weather forecasts that the Iro receives from the weather station. I’m not sure if you’ve had a chance to double check these, but perhaps we’ll need to reach out to the national weather station and make sure it’s reporting proper data.

This is a chicken and egg problem in which the earlier we check weather, the less accurate the predicted (and observed) weather could be…especially if a storm occurs between the check and the scheduled watering time. I do believe Flex schedules (coming in our v2.0 release) will be a great solution to this concern as they will check the weather logs against your lawn’s water needs on a daily bases and update the watering schedule as needed.

Hope this helps.

Best, Emil

Hi there, i am having issues with this as well. I set my Rachio to use local station MID DW9947. As reported yesterday (seen here), 0.4 in of rain in my area. I prefer to water my lawn in the early morning i.e. 1am.

However, my Rachio history tells me this:

“Dry was not skipped since station MID_D9947 observed 0.0 in and predicted 0.27 in of precipitation and the total threshold is 0.5 in” (note: “Dry” refers to the watering schedule I set for two of my zones)

My concerns:

  1. 0.0 in meaning for today? What about the 0.4 in of rain yesterday?
  2. Even if my total threshold is 0.5 in, shouldn’t the Rachio water less since it is smart enough to know that I already got 0.4 in of rain yesterday and predicted 0.27 in today (total of 0.67 in)? Instead, I got a 100% watering down of the lawn.

Thanks,
John

@jzanick, good questions. I think we could be running into a few issues:

  1. Sometimes PWS stations can have a delay in reporting – I’m curious if that’s what we ran into here.
  2. The Iro does it’s weather check roughly 1-2 hours before the scheduled watering time. Do you happen to recall when the 0.4 in of rainfall took place the day before the watering time?

At this time, the watering times are static and do change if not skipped. However, in our v2.0 release, we’ll be adding Flex schedules, which will water as needed (using user imposed restrictions). Each zone will have it’s own “bank account” that will increase with “deposits” (watering events, rainfall, etc) and decrease with “withdrawals” (evaporation, wind, etc). A minimum and maximum budget for each zone will be set and the water level will automatically be kept within this budget given watering rules you set. Think of it as automated watering times with real time, seasonal adjustments on a daily basis.

Hope this helps to address your concerns. Please let me know if you have any others.

Best, Emil

Continuing the discussion from Rain yesterday / Water scheduled today:

I am looking at their data and it seems like they are consistently reporting every 4 hours. I looked at my Rachio and every time there is rain the day/night (4 hours to 24 hours) before watering, it always shows me “MID_D9947 observed 0.0 in”. I would appreciate it if you could help look into this discrepancy.

Hi @jzanick, sorry I didn’t see your reply sooner.

Looks like this is the weather feed from MID_D9947; could you please confirm?

From here, we can cross check the observed weather at the time the Iro ran a weather check to decide if it should skip or run your watering time.

Looking forward to troubleshooting with you.

Thanks, Emil

Hi @emil , you are right. That is the correct weather feed.

In this area, when it rain, it pours. It is important to me that Rachio adjusts accordingly to reduce water usage. I know that flex schedules are coming soon in v2.0.

At the moment, my main concern is “MID_D9947 observed 0.0 in” when we just experienced heavy rain. This happens every time and it is telling me that you are not getting the correct data from the local weather station. Please check and advise.

Thank you!
John

Hi @jzanick, can we test your local National Weather Station and see if there’s different results? I believe MID_D9947 isn’t reporting accurate information per your feedback. I’d recommend letting the weather station owner know it’s reporting bad data and that their PWS might need some maintenance.

Thoughts?

Hi @emil, can you check since MID_D9947 is reporting accurate information on the site weather feed from MID_D9947?Could it be something wrong on your receiving end?
I can change it to the national feed but I prefer to stay with D9947 since they are much closer and are reporting accurate data.

@jzanick, the Iro checks for weather roughly 1 hour before your scheduled watering time. I’m curious if the PWS isn’t reporting weather data to the weather service quickly enough?

We can see what the Iro saw by going into the Iro’s history feed in the mobile app and searching for the day.

Alternatively, you could also check on the webapp and filter the history feed (below)

Hope this helps :smile:

Best, Emil