Last night after midnight it started to rain. Before going to bed I noticed the Virtual Rain Sensors had updated to show 4mm of rain and had switched off the irrigation system (I have 3 for three different criteria covering total precipitation over 1, 2 and 3 days and using PLEG for AND/OR logic). This morning I came down to find my pws registering over 50mm of rain overnight but the VRSs showing 0mm. Looking at the Data tabs for the devices today’s rain comes up as N/A (which VERA translates as 0 in the device listing). Forcing an update in the Data tab does no good, N/A keeps coming up although Wunderground is showing the correct precipitation total on the website. Any idea what is going on? The arrangement has worked fine for the last couple of months and the only difference has been the addition of a third VRS last week and the absence of such heavy rain.
Update: so 24 hours have passed and the 52.3mm of rain is now yesterday. The two VRSs set to aggregate 2 and 3 day rainfalls have updated and now show yesterdays rainfall correctly. So it would seem the 52.3mm reading was only a problem when it was “today”. It’s not clear to me if it was a problem with Wunderground or the weather add-in though.
I’ve had this happen on my instance of Virtual Rain Sensor, too … I was never able to pin it down, but I think it’s just an intermittent glitch in the data it pulls from Weather Underground. Like what you are experiencing, it clears up after a short bit.
For this reason, I installed a physical rain sensor to prevent my irrigation system from kicking off if it’s raining (or has rained) and Virtual Sensor doesn’t catch it beforehand. It’s a decent backup to the vsensor app.
I am running the Opensprinker app to control my system and ended up modifying the implementation xml file to pull the status of the physical rain sensor variable so I can cross check it against the Virtual Sensor.
It’s been a stable setup so far.