I have a Davis weather station (plus seven Campbell Scientific professional stations) that are linked to CWOP and Weatherunderground, however my Davis Station (KCAORIND146) that has been reporting since 20+ years and is live in all networks (WU, CWOP/APRS, WeatherLink, PWS) does not show up in Rachio anymore. It used to. Digging into this further there are five (5) other stations nearby in WU that are also not showing up in Rachio, the closest showing up is a station that is actually not in other nets and some 3.5 miles away in area with highly local microclimates. This does not work. In fact it is bizarre that even in the large cut out of Rachio’s map barely any stations are listed.
The whole point of Rachio was to connect it to local, ie PWS, weather. Why does this not work? Why are other users having such issues? Why is CWOP not anymore supported? Why can we not force Rachio to accept a specific (own) weather staion by handle from WU, CWOP or WeatherLink?
Similar issue(s) posted here as well: All Weather Underground PWS Stations are gone
Interestingly enough, although the PWS I use is no longer listed/selectable in the Rachio weather station list, it does seem to still be used for my Flex Daily watering schedules (i.e., it is shown as the selected weather station in the soil moisture table).
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I just saw that, The response I got from support@rachio.com was an AI-bot generated lengthy email with no usable information. It seems to be a FUBAR SNAFU as the stations listed make no sense. I am not using the Flex Daily yet but will check that out.
One serious concern I have, based upon delivering data to multiple networks (APRS, CWOP, WeatherLink, PWSWeather, WU) is that the smarties at Rachio rely on some quality metric “developed” by some of those networks (especially PWSWeather and WU). The reality is that I am running seven stations conforming to WMO standards and the “models” used by folks such as WU and PWSWeather (IBM and Vaisala respectively) consistently flag real world data from them - not because the data is flawed but the model is not working good enough when you all of a sudden have more data than the model is trained with in a location, such as too many sensors in a space or sensors in spaces where there were none. So the models hallucinate. If you then as Rachio rely on hallucinating models you get garbage. Obviously they won’t admit that as it challenges their sales proposition.
Just looked at mine, and the weather station I’d been pointed to for years at the end of my street has gone missing. Closest personal is now 8+ miles away. That same weather station is missing from WU website as well. Wonder if this is a temporary WU issue, or if they just purged a lot of weather stations for some reason.
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Now, today the closest weather station is an airport 11 miles away. Stations that were still there are all gone. This is all garbage and a clusterf at Rachio’s doing. I exchanged several emails with ever more stupid non-technical “solutions” and explanations.
I think they are lost and that whole functionality is gone, which effectively makes the station a remote controllable irrigation controller like any other. The enshitification of smart devices. It lasted for a year.
What makes you automatically assume it is Rachio’s doing (not saying it isn’t)?
The weather information is handed to Rachio via a third party that they and many others use. If that third party is having temporary (or permanent) issues, it isn’t directly on Rachio here.
Again, it very well may just be someone forgot to renew with said third party with the transition to RanBird ownership, but I think it is hard to jump to conclusions. When I look at WU website, my area was littered with stations, now there are fewer. And looking even more closely at the map (assuming the map is geographically accurate) the station I have pointed to for years looks like it might have just changed names from KAZGILBE300 to KAZGILBE173. The dot on the map looks identical to what I’ve had for years. 173 doesn’t show up in Rachio, so maybe WU revamped and there is a slight delay in them showing back up?
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Rachio is pulling the info from WU through API. WU is changing and updating that per their website. I have other APIs pulling and supplying from/to WU and they work fine. Either some programmer at Rachio did not track this, or messed with the code, or tried to find a different/cheaper way to integrate the WU data. My suspicion is that WU (part of IBM), is asking for more money and Rachio did not price that in. So now fiat! Suspicious is also the lack of useable response from Rachio, so they have no support staff to address the issue. WU will issue a new ID every time someone requests a new ID and it maybe people trying to figure out what is going on at Rachio, because that is the instruction customer support sends out. The problem is that Rachio needs to sort this out and not sent out emails for us users to figure out the API issues. I am in the reltaviely well-heeled Bay Area and there are plenty of stations to pick from and the closest they have is 11 miles away.
@franz @dane any ideas on this issue? I have my Tempest sending updates to Wunderground so my nearby neighbors can utilize it for their Rachios and my Tempest is no longer available for them even though I can go directly to Wunderground website and see updates.
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After several emails and exchanges my personal WS is showing up, still any of the others in the vicinity with WU do not. So, I think it is fair to say they applied a one off custom fix, but the underlying issue is not fixed, and is related to how Rachio is pulling info, ie the WU API provides an incomplete list of available stations and Rachio then relays that with no option to overwrite which station to use. A better solution would be to have users of PWS enter their preferred station by ID. As I do for SmartThings or Hubitat.
And the PWS disappeared again over the weekened. Some others appeared but the point of the weather station is that we are in the bottom of a valley and the microclimate is significant to influence evapotransporation and with that watering needs. It seems that Rachio management has somewhat lost drive and interest in delivering on the promise after they sold out to Rainbird, or that Rainbird “refocuses” the direction. Just sad.
So much potential, but where is the difference to other remote controlled devices from Toro, Orbit, Hunter, even RainBird? It reminds me of other home automation such as SmartThings until that was taken over by Samsung.
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Same here. All is blank now on both National and Personal. This is getting worse everytime and I dont see anything happening from Rachio about it
I read this with interest, then went to look, and my station ID is still present in my configuration.
It is sad to see consolidation taking away the features that made the products so distinctive. I too watched the SmartThings de-evolution after acquisition. I’m about to see the same thing out of my Rainforest box as they point everyone toward a more cloud-y solution.
I personally don’t think this is a long term thing. Honestly, in the handoff, this could be a simple fumble that just needs to have a third party API updated to the system that provides this information to Rachio.
Yes, but Rainbird is the owner now, the Rachio folks cashed out, and Hunter has a competitive product in the market for professionals. It really reeks like SmartThings. Rainbird is focused on selling hardware and not on the nice to have that may actually even sell less of what they sell. Rachio’s prop was to lower and adjust watering - Rainbird? The enshitification has already begun with advertisements of equipment popping up all over the place and the customer service largely being unresponsive.
Yes, the mechanics of it may be simple once you get to it. But they do not seem to get to it as the API call (to WU) is still wrong and brings back the wrong stations. Rachio used to have CWOP stations, which they do not have anymore. Again all those are features that would be nice but not revenue bearing. So it may have to be Hunter.
PurpleAir is another example waiting to happen. They sell great devices but where is the longterm business model to support the true value which is the integration and big data view. Rainbird needs to answer that as well.
While it probably won’t be a forever thing…Rachio has stated that it will be an independent Rain Bird company. I’m sure that won’t come without some backend changes, but I think the goal was to keep Rachio as whole as possible.
I did a little more poking around, and the issue seems to be that WU delivers two different representations of available weather data: (1) through an API request, (2) all stations listed on Wundermap. (1) and (2) are not the same; (1) is a filtered subset based upon unclear algorithms used by IBM/WU, probably also using some modelling, as IBM/WU probably sees that as its commercial product. Rachio is using the WU API and gets (1), users who have a PWS want (2). The API does not help Rachio serve its customers’ needs, and WU does not care, as IBM is in the business of selling other people’s data in a repackaged form. So you have a misalignment of interests. Rachio would have to revert to CWOP and APRS, and PWS users would need to upload there to have an alternative to the bastardized version WU has become. Rachio uses the WU platform to access the PWS more or less as a conduit for data, but WU does not want to share the data, and its model works at a large scale but not in micrometeorology.
I have been running for years eight micrometeorology stations at the WMO accuracy level for research purposes funded by DOE, and we feed the data into CWOP and WU, and their quality algorithms regularly flag the real-world data as false, because it would rather believe its flawed model than the real-world. WU is becoming weather-slop, and Rachio with it. It’s like if you used AI to do anything in the real world - at your own peril.
Rachio cashed out, WU cashed out, the expertise and promise made the deal work and now it is enshitification.
I guess the bottom line is that the “smart sensors” are not as smart as you when looking out and adjusting the irrigation on the app, which reduces the benefit of Rachio to a lower-cost remote-controlled controller. Orbit, Toro, and Hunter can do the same, and the latter two are professional and may have or do have actual weather integration and sensors to work with it, as well as support that is responsive.
All right, seems to be representing all WU stations (wundermap) back on the WU API and thus also on the Rachio map. Will monitor if this changes (as it has several times in the last weeks).
