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Davis Vantage Vue rain reporting issue

Discussion specific to Davis weather stations
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TwoTonTed
Posts: 40
Joined: Wed 26 Aug 2015 5:39 pm
Weather Station: Davis Vantage Vue
Operating System: Windows 11
Location: St Brides, Vale of Glamorgan

Davis Vantage Vue rain reporting issue

Post by TwoTonTed »

over the last couple of days my station has been intermittently reporting rain data. At the moment it's not reporting any rain information whilst it's raining hard; temperature/wind/humidity are quite normal so communication with the console is fine.

Do I have a hardware problem with the rain collector? I cleaned it out yesterday, and it appeared to be working fine, at least mechanically. I guess the station counts the tips and transmits that as data?

I hope I dont need a new station!!

Thanks
martinu
Posts: 85
Joined: Wed 01 Jan 2014 7:54 pm
Weather Station: Davis Vantage Vue
Operating System: Raspberry Pi: Raspbian Stretch
Location: Rudston, North Yorkshire

Re: Davis Vantage Vue rain reporting issue

Post by martinu »

Does Cumulus (and the Davis Console) record an extra 0.2 mm of rain each time you manually tip the "spoon" in the same way that rainfall would tip it? If not, you may need a new tipping spoon. I'm not sure how it communicates with the ISS (the large white sensor housing) but I found that the spoon would increment the railfall counter even when it had been unscrewed from the housing below the conical rain collector.

Before you create any "artificial rainfall" events, I suggest that you look at the today/yesterday/monthly/this year/all time record values for rainfall rate, and make a note of the values and times - because when you tip the spoon manually, you will almost certainly create a ludicrously large rainfall rate which will exceed all the genuine values stored already, so you'll want to know what values to hand-edit into the monthlyalltime.ini, today.ini, yesterday.ini, alltime.ini and year2020.ini (etc) files. You'll need to restart Cumulus after modifying those files.
TwoTonTed
Posts: 40
Joined: Wed 26 Aug 2015 5:39 pm
Weather Station: Davis Vantage Vue
Operating System: Windows 11
Location: St Brides, Vale of Glamorgan

Re: Davis Vantage Vue rain reporting issue

Post by TwoTonTed »

thanks, I spoke with Pro Data and it's under warrantee fortunately. It's my second Vue, the previous one lasted around 5 years and I remembered that it came with this :) They say it's either the tipping mechanism or something up with the circuitry.

Mind you, in fiddling with it, I've created load of work to go back and edit files; seems like I should have turned the console off before hand - is this the correct procedure?
RayProudfoot
Posts: 3372
Joined: Wed 06 May 2009 6:29 pm
Weather Station: Davis VP2 with Daytime FARS
Operating System: Windows XP SP3
Location: Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire, England
Contact:

Re: Davis Vantage Vue rain reporting issue

Post by RayProudfoot »

TwoTonTed wrote: Tue 06 Jul 2021 12:22 pm Mind you, in fiddling with it, I've created load of work to go back and edit files; seems like I should have turned the console off before hand - is this the correct procedure?
You should close CumulusMX and put the console into setup mode. Then you have around 25 mins to clean the rain gauge before the console comes out of that mode. You can take it out manually of course.

Use the facilities in CumulusMX to edit today’s rain, all-time records and monthly record for July as multiple tips may have created new all-time records. When you’re happy with the data restart CumulusMX.

Show your weather website and I’ll have a look for anything ‘bad’.
Cheers,
Ray, Cheshire.

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