Hello,
I have a Weatherflow PiConsole that is constantly reporting lightning (5.5k today, 7.7k for the year but I think it rolled over at 64k events last night) I don’t see any lightning events on the Weatherflow app. I have another Tempest right beside it that is not reporting any Lightning events. I’ve tried rebooting the RPI and it’s still reporting Lightning events. Are there any log files that might show what’s going on?
I’ve had this twice and seemed to coincide with software upgrades. In both cases they stopped after a period of time, not sure why.
Regards
John
I’m thinking about setting up a WeeWX MQTT instance to listen to this Tempest data but I doubt I’ll see any Lightning events coming from it.
Are you using the console with UDP or the REST API?
I am using UDP. I restarted the console this morning and it’s up to 8.5k events today.
Then I suspect the console is displaying correctly. WF filter out false lightning on their servers so you don’t see it in the app, but no such filter exists for the UDP data. If you switch the console to using the Websocket service, the lightning will stop displaying (although your device will continue to detect it)
So most likely the sensor is faulty. Is there any way of grabbing some data to motivate WF to replace the sensor?
You will see lighting from your station if using UDP to WeeWx. I have a graph of them on my site:
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You shouldn’t need to grab extra data. WF will see the lightning info arriving from your device and the amount of times their server-side system has flagged it as false. I would open a ticked to Support
After looking at all my WFPiConsoles, I realized this console was the only one set to UDP. After looking at the UDP data, I see that all 3 of my WF lightning detectors are very active. I’m going to set up a separate AS3935 lightning detector and see if I can adjust the AFE value to get some reasonable detection behavior. Does anybody know if WF does any adjustment to sensitivity to devices in the field?
it can be done on request via a support ticket. It might need 1 or 2 interventions as sensitivity is tweaked in little steps with your feedback.
Thanks I have a ticket open already. I will submit a request for adjustment to my sensors.
Back in the Air+Sky days the fix was to rotate the Sky 90 degrees which almost always quieted things down completely. You can’t do that with the Tempest unfortunately since it always needs to be pointed South for the solar panels.
I guess it would be an interesting future improvement to permit the internals to rotate independently of the direction the solar panels are pointing, or alternately mount the solar below the T+H+L+UV sensors, but that would be quite the hardware change.
The Tempest panels don’t keep up this time of year even facing south but that’s another topic.
Two weeks before the spring equinox??? 
I wrote a script to log the lightning events from my WF Tempest and Air, and I only see events from one Tempest. I see LightningStrikeCount messages and occasionally LightStrikeDistance messages. Does anybody know what the criterion is for sending or not sending LightningStrikeDistance messages?
08:35:10.6905008 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 12.0
08:35:19.2414751 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 10.4
08:35:19.4623779 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1771 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeDistance Value: 7.2
08:36:10.6014590 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 10.0
08:36:10.6034538 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1771 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeDistance Value: 6.0
08:38:10.6312232 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 13.0
08:39:10.7037707 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 12.0
08:40:10.6750563 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 10.0
08:40:19.1107365 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 11.4
08:41:10.6387180 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 9.0
08:42:10.5930686 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 12.0
08:43:10.7305463 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 14.0
08:43:10.7335523 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1771 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeDistance Value: 7.0
08:44:10.5517065 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 13.0
08:44:10.5706405 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1771 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeDistance Value: 8.0
08:45:10.5225051 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 16.0
08:45:20.4245579 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 11.6
08:45:20.4275377 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1771 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeDistance Value: 6.6
08:46:10.6468980 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 15.0
08:46:10.6498719 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1771 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeDistance Value: 8.0
08:47:10.5854307 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 11.0
08:48:10.5720343 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 15.0
08:49:10.4627141 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 13.0
08:50:10.4485707 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 11.0
08:50:20.2817922 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 14.0
08:51:10.6359062 Processing Lightning DevRef: 1770 weather/1/loop:t2lightningStrikeCount Value: 12.0
For what it’s worth, I had a similar problem of false lighting detections.
I moved my Tempest Air several feet away from my outdoor circuit breaker box and the fake lighting strikes stopped.
Much later, I found that I had a defective circuit breaker that must have been arcing.
My situation is different. I have two Tempest sensors mounted a meter apart on my roof far from any electrical cables or panels. One Tempest has numerous (thousands this year) of false lightning events while the Air and the other Tempest are totally quiet (I have a script that monitors the UDP data from all the sensors). Previously the three local sensors and another Tempest I have about 30 miles away would be in sync with Lightning events. I am sure that the Tempest that is constantly reporting lightning has a defective AS3935. My original Sky and a couple of Tempests have failed in various ways and I have replaced them yet my Davis VantagePro2 devices are still working fine after 20 years with a few batteries.
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