We just had a real gullywasher here - about 0.80" in 15 minutes. It all shows up on the Davis VP console but WD only caught about 0.05" of it. It seems to catch the gentle rains just fine. Is there a flaw in WD or is there something I can set to keep this from happening? Over the course of the year we get a lot of short torrential burst here so WD missing most of the rain during these events is major!
I see from your site you are running WD and another software. Do you have WD connected directly (and continuously) to a weatherlink logger, or some other set up?
looking at your weather graphs there is a jump from around 0.45 inches to 1.2 inches - is that a manual correction you have made?
Right. That’s after my manual correction.
The WD site is connected to a Davis VP+ console with weatherlink on one computer and the VWS site is connected to a Davis Weather Envoy with its own weatherlink on a 2nd computer. Both are listening to the same Davis ISS. BTW: Neither the VWS software nor the VP+ connected to WD missed the rain, only the WD software itself missed it.
After the torrential downpour it continued to rain gently for a while longer. This gentle rain was picked up. Apparetly, WD just couldn’t handle the speed at which the rain bucket tips were coming in. I did notice that even though WD did not record the rainfall, it did indicate a rain rate of 277.0 in/hr on the rain rate tag!!!
Apparetly, WD just couldn't handle the speed at which the rain bucket tips were coming inI don't think it can be a "keeping up" issue. The weatherlink data record contains accumulated (day etc) rain totals, it's not like the datalogger is directly sending pulses from the rain gauge. Even if records were missing for some reason, then the total would catch up as soon as a good record was received. I have a suspicion that Brian may have set a max rain rate for the VP to help out those VP users who experience the "rain gauge going bananas" phenomenon. Need to do some research.
Brian is away at the moment but asked that I post this response:
WD does check for what it thinks would be over the top rain amounts.... i must have the reins too tight.....that is very heavy rain chas recorded i will loosen of the reins a bit more in the next version after xmas!
Interesting that you should mention the “rain guage bananas” problem. That started happening on my station periodicially a little over a year ago. After 2-3 occurrences it stopped during the spring and summer and restarted a couple of months back. I finally called Davis. First they sent me a new reed switch for the rain bucket. As expected that didn’t do anything. Then they sent me a new board for the ISS. It hasn’t happened since. I assume this is a well known problem - though the Davis tech didn’t own up to it. They didn’t charge me for the replacement parts even though the warranty ran out a year ago .
It’s admirable of Brian to try and fix a hardware problem in software. The problem with this is that sometimes, it really does rain that hard. Around here probably 4-6 times a year we get a cloud burst like today.
Hmmmm…the “over the top” function must not have been working the day WD thought I had 800 inches of rain. True, it was only reporting what Davis was sending, but it took me quiet awhile to figure out how to fix that. I guess I need to contact Davis about my psychotic rain gage. At the moment I have it imobalized as it is snow season.
Tarma
As I noted, Davis seems willing to send out replacement hardware to fix this problem at no charge even if the warranty has expired. So definitely take them up on the deal while they are being generous.
First they had me try a new mag reed switch before sending me a new ISS board… When I rewired the switch initially, I accidentially wired it wrong and shorted the signal to ground. This is electrically the same as the normally open reed switch being closed all the time. With this happening I got the same reaction as when the bug occurs; i.e. it appeared to be raining torrents non-stop.
The thing this tells me about the Davis design is that they are not checking for the pulse of the switch opening and closing but rather they are rapidly sampling to see when the switch is closed. So when a short occurs on the the ISS board for some reason, which makes it seems like the reed switch is always closed, it appears to be raining in torrents.
The weird thing is the intermittent nature of the problem like moisture is getting into the circuit or something. However, both the old and new boards appear to be very well coated with polyurethane sealant, so who knows what’s really going on. Bottomline: no problems so far after a month on the new board with lots of cold and rainy days.
Interesting. That certainly describes my psychotic rain gage problem! Off to the Davis site.
Thanks!
Tarma
tarma, its not a permanent problem, its just a stick in a certain position problme usually
the check wd was doing was for from 1 reported amount to the next, but that does not stop a steady amount being reported that was under 8mm (which i have now increased to 16mm)