Alternative WU actual rain sensor ?

[zicht]

Hi,

Many thanks for reading this topic !
My Key for Weather Underground has finally been disabled according to the new WU policies.
I used the actual rain sensors to calculate in summer if watering for garden is needed.
It worked great in the past, but now i am looking for a replacement.

Has anyone found a service for getting actual rainvalues for cities ?
- I have open wether setup but it has no actual rainsensor ...

IF there is a service available with actual rain rate somewhere or accumulated rain/day it would perfectly fit..

Best regards,

[pawel]

I've got exactly the same problem. Temperature and humidity values are easy to get even by a cheap sensors but rain data from WU service was invaluable. Even cheap rain counters are very expensive because it's not easy to measure the rain fall

[Nautilus]

Dark Sky returns pretty much the same data as WU, including rain. There is a native support for Dark Sky in Domoticz. I also went ahead a bought the 20$ rain gauge (433Mhz, RFLink supports it) that was recommended here, but I'm not sure if it is very reliable in measuring different types of rains due to the small size (bigger water drops bounce away from it?).

[Toulon7559]

Is Accuweather a candidate?
Already included in the hardware-menu of Domoticz.

But not as 'simple & straightforward' as WUnderground or Darksky:
- a kind of manual 'How to integrate in Domoticz' would be 'nice-to-have' (if not better an 'absolute requirement' for quick connection)
Examples:
- API-key can only be obtained once you have requested from Accuweather an App,
- Location requires the Location key (which is a number, not a name!) which usually can be found very easy by going to the home-page of Accuweather and calling for the weather at your location. The URL then shows the number you need.
Alternatively you have to find the location key delving deep in the location search.

Also OpenWeatherMap is a possible solution with an entry already included in the hardware-menu of Domoticz:
- ask for the API-key through the home-page
- the location similarly is a number which you can find in the URL if (at the home page) you ask the weather for your location.

Now again gearing up with these 2 candidates to replace WUnderground, I know why I earlier kicked them out:
- the location key which AccuWeather provides for my location is not correct and gives me weather probably far to the NorthWest
Example: now here in practise temp is 10 degrees, with 994hPa, in the evening, but with the location key it is -4 degrees, with 1029hPa, with an UVI of 4 ..........
- OWM is OK related to the data, but in the Domoticz-widgets I miss info on rain and a few other things.
On the other hand, OWM has useful examples for API-calls with resulting rather complete collection of data:
it is some work, but with a script and some virtual devices one could make a complete 'sensor-collection' in Domoticz.

Darksky (formerly forecast.io) is a 3rd candidate, but in the past I saw some weird values passing:
reason for me to be hesitating to apply it for 'serious' applications, certainly as a replacement for WeatherUnderground.

Generally I really trust the information from my own PWS, with 'other' info only for reference and for 'sanity-checks'.
'Sanity checks' in the perspective that also own sensors may fail, and then it is useful to check against another data-source that a value is meaningful (or not).
Using my own information, there are plenty of websites which provide display of tailored forecasts [download of info is a different story].

[pawel]

Thanks for a quick answers! Regarding the other services - below my thoughts:
DarkSky - very inaccurate in my location, Weather Underground was very accurate because it had lots of local weather stations spread across the wrold
AccuWeather - I am not able to configure it in Domoticz. Seems to be more accurate than DarkSky (using web interface) but I have no idea what should be in a location field on Hardware menu - tried city names, coordinates and many other combinations but nothing seems to work. The service does not seem to respond on domoticz requests. Any idea how to make it work? Thanks,

[Nautilus]

https://www.domoticz.com/forum/viewtopi ... 08#p208808

For New York, US this would be https://www.accuweather.com/en/us/new-y ... ast/349727 -> 349727

[pawel]

Yes, I know it should work. I've even analyzed the source code here:
https://github.com/domoticz/domoticz/bl ... eather.cpp

Location should be a city name which is used to query accuweather service to retrieve city code. Then another query is performed with a city code as a parameter.
But it does not work in practice despite the fact URL addresses in the source code are correct and working when I used them via a browser

[Nautilus]

Hmm, in that case could it be because:

Code: Select all

		if (sec_counter % 12 == 0) {
			m_LastHeartbeat = mytime(NULL);
		}
		if (sec_counter % 1800 == 0) //50 free calls a day.. thats not much guy's!
		{
			if (m_LocationKey.empty())
			{

https://github.com/domoticz/domoticz/co ... 07daa37afe

So you'd need to be running it up to half an hour (depending when you added it) to see results and in the mean time have new devices allowed?

[pawel]

Indeed, this could be the reason. But in this case it's insane since one could have non-free accuweather plan without these limitations. I've configured this service again and will give it some time

[zicht]

Hi

Many thanks for all suggestions, I added all suggested hardware to see the difference.

AccuWeather has a big deviation, THB is 15kPa off, rain does not detect anything (it has rained enough), temp deviations >4*C.
So this one does not work for me, also because the 2/hour values.

OpenWeather is much better but has no rain sensor. Will keep it to see how the values continue.
Darksky is ok for THB and temp, it has a rain sensor, i will keep this one as well, but i have some doubts about the rain values versus my observations.

Thank you for suggesting the 433Mhz rainsensor i will look into it.

Zicht.

[Nautilus]

...I added all suggested hardware to see the difference. AccuWeather has a big deviation...

Was it about waiting or what was the key to be able to add AccuWeather? And did you use the city name or location ID in Domoticz settings?

Thank you for suggesting the 433Mhz rainsensor i will look into it

This is what I bought, but now sold out: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Wireles ... 07674.html
There are plenty of alternatives though, e.g: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-Sh ... 94724.html
Discussion: https://www.domoticz.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16752

[zicht]

...I added all suggested hardware to see the difference. AccuWeather has a big deviation...

Was it about waiting or what was the key to be able to add AccuWeather? And did you use the city name or location ID in Domoticz settings?

I used the location ID, it took in my case about 20 minutes for the hardware to show up. Like you wrote hard coded timing on a full hour=0 minutes or gald an hour = 30 minutes, (And a couple of seconds for domoticz to process)

Thanks for the links !

[zicht]

I also noticed something weird for the Darksky rainsensor.
No accumulated total value and the rate stays emty. The top value showing up is not right : Seems to be a factor 10 to low.
Wil monitor this a couple of days ....

[pawel]

So I've tested both - DarkSky and AccuWeather. The first one works very strange in my location there are lots of spikes up and down for unknown reason (temp did not behave like this and I don't believe it can behave ever)

darksky.jpg (118.81 KiB) Viewed 1327 times

On the other hand AccuWeather seems to be more accurate but refresh rate once every 30 minutes is not enough for me

Weather underground was invaluable - precise and reliable...

[zicht]

Hi

I see the same.
Accuwether is not reliable at all, darksky strange spikes. Also the rain sensors have some strange habbits with negative values and cummulative and rates are not correct.

I also tried to scrape a local wether station that has a website (not WU) but also there it was raining long time, no values (after contact it turned out the rainsensor was not maintained)

So seems in my case the only thing to do is eighter to become a paying WU user or buy a rain sensor.
For principial reasons i will never pay WU as they use public gathered data, so my sensor will arrive by post next week.
(the reason not to do it was environmental : because the batterys it uses, Why to use an extra set of AA battery's when somebody allready has the values,..)

[Toulon7559]

Your own devices are always best for measurement of the actual local weather!

If your aim is to obtain reliable weather-forecast to replace WUnderground, this message may provide some solutions.
Requires a bit of homework .........