Cumulus Support

At 1:47 this morning my temperature, wind, and rainfall stats all went nuts! 16.02" rain (we're in a drought), 42 degrees (actual low was 80) and wind gusts above 22mph (it was calm all night). Any ideas?????? Could low battery be causing this kind of strange readings?

Thanks,
Ken

khr wrote:Could low battery be causing this kind of strange readings?

Yes, quite likely, if you normally have good reception. How old are the batteries?

The batteries are only about a year old and I put lithium batteris in the outside unit. I have regular duracell alkalines in the indoor wall unit.

Have you seen any "lost contact" messages?
Was there any lightning in the area?

I have gotten several "lost sensor contact" errors. But that has happened off and on for the entire time I've had the unit. So I didn't think much about that. Also, no lightning. We are VERY dry in northwest and basically all of western OK. I would love to see some lightning around. That would mean there's a possibility of some of that dropping wet stuff........I think you call it rain??

Ken
Do you still have the problem or has it now cleared? and have you tried removing batteris from both units and re-inserting them, also do you have a meter to check the voltages just to make sure they are above 1.5 V

I was getting lots of lost sensor error messages... Ambient sent me a new transmitter unit and all is well now.

This was a one-time event 36 hours ago. I haven't taken the batteries out, but that's my next move - thanks.

Also, my unit is over a year old. I doubt Ambient would do anything for it if it is a bad unit.

Thanks for all the ideas. If you have more, let me know.

Ken

I recently started getting lots of Lost Sensor Contact errors and changed the batteries. The old batteries were actually lithiums and only about 6 months old, but I changed them for a brand new set anyway.

Soon after, the errors came back again. I then realised that at about the same time I started to get the errors, I had changed my DECT phones for a new set. One of the handsets I replaced was quite close to the console. I moved the handest well away and that seems to have stopped the errors.

As far as I can remember, there haven't been any changes of electronic or wireless devices in the recent past that could be affecting the wireless transmission of signal, but thanks!

Ken

I have found that the battery contacts can get a bit of corrosion on them after a long time. Cleaning usually improves the situation.

Nevertheless, the data packet sent from the transmitter does not seem to have any error detection / correction built into it, so if a few bits get lost along the way, many parameters can be completely messed up, depending on where in the packet the loss happens. Since you had only one incident, not repeated, it sounds like a burst of electrical noise happened at just the wrong time. I'd put it down to "stuff happens", consider myself lucky it's only happened once in a year, and tackle the fun job of fixing the data.

"Fun job"!!! I've been down that road before trying to fix rainfall. We had an extremely windy day this past winter and evidently the direction was at just the right angle that it rocked back and forth and gave me several hours of rainfall that didn't happen. I also had one event where we got a resonable amount of rain and I recorded nothing. Took the cover off the gauge and discovered a spider had taken up residence in the gauge and built a nice little web that restricted rocker movement. It can be a lot of different things!

Thanks for the input. I'll start the process of correcting data this afternoon as well as take out the batteries and check them for voltage and check terminals for corrosion or dirt.

Ken

I have had a nutty experience myself and it is still happening. Whe I woke up this morning I had a couple of new temperature records, a lowest Maximun of -500C and a Highest minimum of 999C !!.

Since then the data uploaded to the web hasn't changed, although it is regularly updated. The trend graphs are flatlining.

It must be an actual Cumulus problem, since the weather station console is showing correct data. It is still going on now and you can see it at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/m.dixon4/Cumulus/

I could speculate that a single or series of corrupt readings from the weather station hascaused this, the batteries have been in place for a year so must be getting low.

It may be that a simple restart of cumulus will fix it, but I didn't have time to do that this morning. I will try this evening, and see what happens, and then have a go at fixing the data. In the meantime, it is there for all to see.

If there are any data files that would help get to the bottom of this let me know and I will dig them out and post them

Martin

MartinDn wrote:I could speculate that a single or series of corrupt readings from the weather station hascaused this, the batteries have been in place for a year so must be getting low.

It's more likely that Cumulus is unable to read new data from the station; some sort of USB/connection problem.

Thanks Steve, you were right. Rebooting the computer fixed it. I then tried to retrieve the lost date by winding back the time and date in today,ini, but it didn't pick anything up from yesterday. I had deleted yesterday.ini becuse it is rubbish, and it was not re-created. Is there any way to make Cumulus fill in the hole, since the relevant data is still in the base station?

Martin