I live in southern California and the reason I bought a Tempest and run PiConsole is to keep track of the rain. We our having more rain this year than the last few rainy seasons and I can’t help to notice when I view the yearly total on my mobile app which shows for CY2023 8.75 in and when I view it on the PIConsole it only shows 4.71 in. The day and month total seem to match. Is my Piconsole is not syncing correctly and if so how can that be corrected? And yes I run the updates for the Piconsole regularly.
You likely have Near Cast turned on. Since rainfall can vary considerably from one location to another, even in an area as close as your front yard and back yard, Near Cast adjusts the rain fall to match more closely with rainfall over a wider area. It uses your sensor along with radar maps and other nearby sensors to normalize it. The WFPiconsole uses the raw data from your sensor.
It’s easy to see if Near Cast is on as there will be a water drop with a checkmark icon above the rain fall amount in your mobile app. You can turn this off if you want.
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Thank you, you are right. However, as I have only had my Tempest less than a year and running a PIconsole for maybe 8 months I am using my old fashion rain gauge where I have to empty it and manually record the rainfall to use as a comparison to see how accurate my Tempest is. What I just discovered is with NC enabled both gauges rain totals match but with NC disabled the Tempest is way off. Just curious how you and others run your Tempest with or without NC enabled. Is there a way to enable NC in PiConsole? Thanks Mark
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Unfortunately not. The PiConsole can only display raw rain data currently
WeatherFlow makes the conversion from Near Cast to Local and back in the cloud entirely. The Near Cast flag is only for display purposes. Your Tempest is ALWAYS sending exactly what you see on your PiConosole. What this means is that you can turn Near Cast on and off at will and it will not affect anything. In otherw ords, if you pull up a recent rain event in the app and look at an amount, then go into the settings and turn rain cast on/off, it’ll show a new value.
So for your purpose, you could leave Near Cast on if you want, and then when you want to see the actual amount your sensor recorded to compare with your manual gauge, go into the app turn off Near Cast and look at your history and it’ll show you actual data.
Resurrecting this for an upvote to see if there could be a way to select raw data or “rain check” data. My Tempest if usually off on rain quite a bit, and the rain check is always very close to my neighbors calibrated gauges. For example Yesterday…Tempest and PiConsole say I got 2.10", RainCheck says 0.94". That’s a significant difference. I know the 0.94" is much closer to the real value.
Showing NC Rain on the console is not necessarily straight forward. The console is designed to display data in real time, whereas NC rain is a post processed product that is available some time after the actual rain event. I’m happy to take another look into this, but can’t promise anything
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Thanks. I understand where you’re coming from. The only reason I ask is because I also have a Tidbyt display and they app they have for that that links to my Tempest and it follows the rain check value. Mine updates that value pretty quickly. Even if it was next day (showing in the “yesterday” value and in the month/year) that would be great! The “today” doesn’t need to be adjusted if it’s too convoluted.