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.
