Notification suggestion: weather not updated
Implemented
How about a notification if your weather has not updated in X amount of hours or days? The unit knows how long since its last weather update so if something goes wrong with that system for whatever reason it would be nice to get a notification that the unit is either going to overwater or underwater because its lost its ability to get weather updates.
I was having intermittent problems where every few months my unit would stop getting weather updates and after a few days it would start doing a full water schedule (even in the middle of a monsoon) or not water for days. The only way to fix was an unplug reboot. Rainmachine replaced my wifi antenna hoping that was the problem. Now I've got my unit back but wont know the problem is gone but afraid it will happen again in a few months and I wont catch it until my watering has been screwed up for weeks.
I've set up IFTTT to let me know if my unit goes "offline" to hopefully catch if the wifi dies, and I tried the "notification when weather updates" but the weather updates every 4 hours and I use two weather services and have two devices (phone and tablet) so I was literally getting 40+ notification a day and had to turn it off.
Having a "weather has NOT been updated" notification seems a lot more useful than a "weather HAS been updated" notification.
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Hi, Mike
Thank you for your suggestion.
RainMachine keeps trying to update the weather services every minute after the scheduled update did not occur.
So, for example, if NOAA weather service did not update at 06:00 AM, RainMachine will continue to "ask" NOAA for the new data each minute.
We will need minimum time frame interval (eg: 24 hours) that passed after the RainMachine did not get the weather update data and then send the notification to the user.
That's why we are gathering more feedback for your suggestion right now.Thank you, Mike
RainMachine Support -
IMO a weather report/forecast is only good for 2-3 days. After 2 days the weather could be completely different than the forecast from 2 days prior. Usually the temp is close but actual rain could be completely opposite. I dont know how often the unit actually checks weather, or if its common for a weather service to go down and for how long. But for me a perfect notification would be between 24 and 48 hours of not being able to get weather info. At that point I'd want to know something was wrong and I have to check the unit to see whats going on, and either add watering or water less until the weather was properly updated again.
Or would it be too complex to ask the used to set the time limit? Turn on the "No weather update notification" switch and a checkbox asks the timeframe? A checkbox with "12 hours / 24 hours / 2 days / 3 days"? Then a user could have a low timeframe if they are having issues with weather updates or a longer timeframe if they have reliable weather in their location/their unit?
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Hi, Ian
Under the "Weather Update" ON/OFF switch there are two push notifications, one for successfully updated weather service and one for no weather updates for at least 24h since the last successful update. You will automatically get a notification when during a period of at least 24h since the last successfully weather update your RainMachine didn't get weather updates at all from any weather services you may have selected.
As for now, the "Notify me when there are no weather updates" ON/OFF switch is not available on our mobile apps.
We will announce when they will be available.
Thank you for your understanding,
RainMachine Support
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