Evapo Transpiration (ET) From Weather Data
Chart on 'Settings/Weather' state that 'Daily Evapo Transpiration Seasonal Adjustments' will get 'Used when weather data could not be fetched from internet' is 'False'
For the third time this summer my system has not watered (when it should have watered a lot) - or should I say very/very/very little to the point that I took action and started to look into it. The statement above is very 'True' or should I say 'False'
Last night I checked the system - stated it will water 83% - okay. When I go home today, you could tell the system had not watered and the lawn will not make it until the next scheduled watering. Checked, it watered 8% today.
Daily ET for the last two days is at 0 (zero) - I thought how could this ever happen, never 0 unless maybe a steady rain fell for the last two days straight, but no rain has fallen.
I looked at the weather station I am using: It has gone off-line at the time my system is set to water. See screen shots.
There is definitely something incorrect with the software. Maybe the system did get data, but a 0 should trigger something is incorrect about the data received. The statement maybe 'True' if the Internet is not reachable?
I have changed to another station, no longer two doors down. This should be looked into, as I can not be the only one this has happened to. Maybe the only one whom has found a reason as to why it happens.
-
Update: Found this under the program page using the Webui - set the time to Month. I had always wondered what the 'grey' dots represented. Now I know it is the ET for the day. This shot shows all three times this summer the system had not watered. One was over a week long, previous the system had watered over 100% and when it did get readings again, you see the ET is off the chart, above 100. I had to manually water four times during that one week. The other two times you will see a 'blue' little bump, this is where the system did a little trickle of water.
This is a major bug - If data is not collected from the weather station for that day - the ET should not go to '0'.At least now I know what happened, but it took this third time of not watering for me to look into it.
-
Hi Jeff,
We don't add 0 if there is no data, only if we receive 0 from the weather service. I guess you are using Weather Underground, can you tell me the weather station ID/Name so I can look back in the past for it's data ? Do you use the beta version of RainMachine or the stable version ?
-
Hello Nicholas,
You are correct, I am using Weather Underground for actual data - the station is (Paul's Place) KMNSTILL23 (should say was). It has been off line every day from ~03:00 to ~08:00 CDT for the last five days. If again tomorrow, I may simulate to see the data the system pulls down. I am running the 'Stable' version of 4.0.925.
You stated that the system does not add '0' - but from the manual the ET is calculated from many sources. I am sure that one of those is 'solar Radiation' - on 2018-08-05 the Solar Radiation from Weather Underground appears to be a -267.2799999. From a negative number for solar radiation, I'm sure the ET calculated from the system would then be '0' it would not know how to handle a negative number? After I changed stations on 2018-08-06 at 18:54 and did a 'Refresh' the solar radiation was now at 15.16. ET remained at 0 until calculations took place on 2018-08-07 shortly after midnight.
This is what I see from the logs. The earliest log still available was at 03:03 on 2018-08-06, so I can not tell when it started to record the negative number for this value.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
4 comments