Using WUnderground.com to integrate Personal Weather Stations

There are several wunderground stations near my house, would be great to be able to use them as a weather source.

@ptr727ā€Œ If you enable using personal weather stations in the app we support most through http://pwsweather.com/ and http://wxqa.com/.

I would be wary of any station that is not yours, we have had a lot of data quality issues :slight_smile:

Problem with your current stations are that they are too far away, specifically too far inland, making them less applicable vs. the LAX station.

As for being weary of a station that is not mine, surely that reasoning would apply to any station, even the ones you support?

As there is no option (I could find) to select my station of preference, I do not know if there are any better stations, maybe even the ones I know from wunderground, than the one auto selected by the app?

@ptr727ā€Œ We allow you to choose to enable PWS or not. As far as data quality for the PWS, we donā€™t have control of that. We currently will pick the station closest to your house (PWS or non-PWS). In our next version of mobile we will allow you to select from a list of stations.

I only provide the warning around PWS since these are sometimes in peopleā€™s backyards and can be affected by a whole host of things.

Thanks and let us know if you have any other feedback!

So,

I just got my Meteobridge up and running EW7209 is my CWOP call sign. Before I pay the license to MB I would like to know that I will be able to reference my PWS for my IRO. Lots of info to digest but it appears if I am on CWOP that should be all that is neededā€¦ however, when I reference my IRO I donā€™t get any PWSā€™s that are close byā€¦ only ones miles way and I have several that are close and reporting. Any ideas?

Hi @leeowen, good afternoon. Thanks for reaching out regarding your PWS.

We do support CWOP ā€“ for details on setup, please see this support article.

Iā€™ve heard it can take a few days after the Meteobridge is setup before it will register with our weather services.

Let me know if you have any further questions after reviewing the support article.

Best, Emil

Thanks Emil! I ave followed those instructions. My station ID is EW7209. Can you check to see if I am in your system? Thanks in advance!

Hi @leeowen, looks like youā€™re currently pulling weather from MID_E5921. I donā€™t think EW7209 has populated in to our weather API yet.

Can we recheck tomorrow and see? Iā€™m sure it just needs to sleep in a bit more and have some time to wake up :wink:

Thanks, Emil

Thanks Emil! Will do!:sunglasses:

Hi @leeowen, just wanted to check in. Is EW7209 showing up for you yet?

It sure is! Thanks for checking in

I was thinking of buying a PWS so I could get better local weather data but was not thrilled about spending the money. I looked on Weatherunderground and found several PWSs near me. I evaluated the data quality on them and found one that has a great record of reliable data.

I downloaded a WeatherSnoop 3 trial and chose the WU PWS as my data source as opposed to using a PWS that I would own. I then shared this data to PWSweather.com to a station that I created for this purpose. The data is syncing along nicely now although I donā€™t see it when I enable PWS in the mobile app. My guess is that it will take a while to get the data through to the system Rachio is using.

This seems to be a fairly low cost way to go as Weathersnoop Lite will transmit the data for $20 license fee.

@Tomzo, good afternoon!

Very interesting! Please keep us posted on this integration. This sounds like a great workaround to pulling weather data from wunderground.

Are you allowed to change stations should the PWS go offline or data integrity suffer?

Thanks for sharing, great find! :smile:

Best, Emil

Weaathersnoop allows you to select a wide variety of sources of weather data, so if the PWS on WU that I chose starts to have data quality issues I will simply select another nearby that is working well.

There is a PWS that the Rachio software ā€œseesā€ nearby but itā€™s rain sensor is out of service because it shows no rain for May but we have had nearly 2 inches.

I will update as I finalize the installation of the Weathersnoop software. I was testing it on my laptop but since that shuts down from time to time I will reinstall it on an iMac I keep running in my house so there wonā€™t be interruptions in the data stream.

Update - I installed Weathersnoop Lite ($20) on my iMac yesterday and it is dutifully transferring the data from the WU station that my neighbor has set up to a PWSweather station that I set up (LEHNER). The one thing that is odd is that even through both the agent on Weathersnoop that monitors WU and the sharing system that uploads to PWS are set to act every minute, the data on PWS only changes every 15 minutes. There are a whole series of identical sets of data stacked up that change slowly over time. I donā€™t think that this will be an issue as this is plenty of data to run the IRO, but I thought it was an interesting data transfer anomoly.

I have yet to see this station pop up as the closest station to me in the Rachio software, but I figured that might take a couple of days. It is my understanding that v2.0 will allow me to select it directly and that is coming soon!

Update II - After looking at the data a bit more closely, it seems that the WU PWS that I am scalping data from only uploads data every 15 minutes, so that is why my data is changing so slowly. I suppose I can drop my refresh rate down to match.

@Tomzo, good morning! Thanks for the updates. A few questions to help other users:

Has moving Weathersnoop to your iMac/desktop fixed the data reporting issue?

Usually it takes 24-48 hours for the weather feed from PWS to become visible to the Iro. Please let us know once the Iro is able to see the Wunderground station.

And yes, v2.0 will allow you to select a preferred weather station :smile:

Any tips you could share on setting up Weathersnoop would be greatly appreciated. With your permission, Iā€™d like to create a support article with this information.

Thanks again all your help with this Very exciting news to be able to bridge Wunderground stations to the Iro!

Best, Emil

Looking forward to that. My Iro has been installed about 1 week. My weather station has been publishing to WU for years. I connected to PWS and started to publish there this afternoon. Hope my Iro will be able to see it soon.

My Iro took 48 hours before it started ā€œseeingā€ my Netatmo on PWS and WU. Itā€™s been working great ever since.

@Norida, awesome, great news!! Just curious, did you have your Netatmo setup on WU before PWS?

Did you use Weathersnoop?

Best, Emil