Hey, I have yet-another Weather Intelligence problem, but this isn’t the usual: so Flex Daily was once again trying to kill my landscaping and I believe I traced it to the weather data being way off. I have 2 controllers: one was set to “Weather Network” and the other to “KCAMORGA135”. IDK how to find the “Weather Network” data source but KCAMORGA135 shows highs around 90 the last 3 days, which is roughly accurate and consistent with other nearby stations (e.g., KCAMORGA132). Meanwhile my controller shows temperatures peaking at 70 for both controllers, which is a far cry from 90. I assume this is why my irrigation isn’t running.
Any idea what’s going on here and how to fix it? Because I need to get my landscaping back on a sane watering schedule ASAP.
@Linn so I don’t know how it could not depend on temperature, as aside from rainfall that is primary weather input into most evapotranspiration models I’m aware of (e.g., Penman-Monteith and Hargreaves-Samani). Also the forecast data is correct and the projected irrigation schedule is consistent with what it was in the past before the WI data went bad; however, the trailing soil moisture is always far less than the forecast, less than they historically were, and less than they should be based on observation.
In order to keep things alive I’ve been going through and resetting the soil moisture by hand every night since the pattern is that it says it’ll run the next day based on the forecast but then uses the incorrect data and decides not to run in the morning. So at this point there’s only 2 zones that used to run every 2-3 days that were not reset: Zone 1 and Zone 6 (screenshots in the links).
Also FWIW I was on the PG&E (electric company) portal yesterday. They graph temperature as a metric on the same graph as energy usage since that’s the primary driver of power usage and their temperature data is wrong, too! So I think both Rachio and PG&E buy their weather data feed from the same source (likely the Weather Group, LLC who owns The Weather Channel and the Weather Underground) and that data source is wrong. I’m guessing based on zip code or something it lumped me in with a nearby coastal city like Watsonville (zip code 95076 vs mine 95037) which would have these temperatures.
So:
How do I escalate this? Because I’m pretty sure I’m correct (fwiw I have 30+ years of professional experience with software automation and 8 with irrigation automation, having partly written my own software at my previous house).
What workarounds do I have w/o destroying all the hard work I put into getting Flex Daily working? Because I have 22 zones and managing the water by hand every night is getting old real fast.
@Linn my crop coefficients are set according to professional sources. E.g., Crop Coefficients (Kc) for Mature Peach Trees from the University of California. That said, lying about them would just be a hack to cover for the fact that the controller is not behaving as it was just a week or two ago, likely due to the fact that the weather data is wrong enough to halve the evapotranspiration. And I’d have to enter that lie 22 times (once for each zone).
So if I’m going to lie about something, maybe it should be my address (which I’d only have to enter twice)? So I’ve just done that and immediately the backwards-looking weather data on the home screen is correct for yesterday. If tonight the evapotranspiration goes back to normal then I’ll be fine until the rainy season when having a precise location becomes more important.
I agree. Something is clearly not been right the last few days with a selection of Weather Network. Was showing temps for several days of over 100, and today showing temps of under 80 for next few days. Rain forecasts seemed wrong as well.
All days have been around 85-90 degrees as a high and that is the general prediction going forward on other sources. Very odd. I just changed the setting to a single station near me and now predictions are fairly comparable to other weather sources. Shortly after I switched to a single station, I switched back to Weather Network, and the temps and rain probability all went back to correct.
@jgrahamiii FWIW I’d tried last week just changing the single weather station since there are 3 good ones near me (which I know because I spend way too much time on Weather Underground) and that didn’t help at all. OtoH lying about my address did fix it (ETo is plausible and watering frequency is what it used to be). Now really the main problem I have is the fact that it wasn’t watering enough had caused me to randomly tweak other settings to try and keep my landscaping alive over the period that I’d noticed a lack of watering, and now I have to go back and try and reset things to keep from over-watering, except I don’t remember exactly what the “original” settings were.
