Cumulus Support

I am new to running a weather station and have been running the Maplin N96FY (WH1081) station with Cumulus since 3 January 2014.

All appears to be working fine and I have been learning fast by reading the FAQs on this web-site (many thanks to everyone who has contributed to them).

This morning I noticed that some of the entries in my All Time record are different from those in my Monthly, This Month and This year records. Surely they should all be the same as I have only been running the station for a few days?

Thanks for any help.

Flosex

The "This Month" etc displays get their highs and lows differently, calculated 'on the fly' from the daily highs and lows in dayfile.txt. But dayfile.txt should normally catch the highs and lows anyway. Note that those displays don't include the current day.

If you zip up the diags folder, and the data folder, and attach them here, I'll take a look. Please also indicate which particular items are different.

Thanks for your speedy reply, Steve.

The files you asked for are attached.

Regards

Flosex

All of the ones that I can find where there are differences are from before the earliest point in the diags files, i.e yesterday at about 11:00, so I can't see what happened. I'm afraid I have no idea how they could have differed, all of the ones since then seem fine. Perhaps something stopped Cumulus writing to the relevant files.

The easiest solution, as you only have a few days data, would be to stop Cumulus and delete the contents of the data folder (i.e. restart data collection from that point). And then keep an eye on them for a few days to see if they start to differ again.

Thanks again Steve. I did wonder if that might be the answer. I have done that this afternoon and took the opportunity to re-site the station after reading the advice about that elsewhere on this site.

On a different topic, I have been trying to work out what calibration factor for Wind Speed and Wind Gust I should set in Cumulus to make up for the 1.6m height above ground of my wind sensor against the recommended 10m height? I have read various web pages (including several on this site) but some of the advice seems to conflict. My station is sighted in the middle of a large field with no immediate obstacles around it (we live out in the country).

The general consensus seems to be to increase the readings by 10% for each 3m. This would mean an increase of 28% on my set up (if I have calculated it correctly), or 2.8 calibration in Cumulus. This seems rather high to me and I would appreciate advice on this, please.

Thanks and regards

Flosex

An increase of 28% is a multiplier of 1.28. This page in the wiki gives a formula, and the table of examples suggests you need about 1.31 - http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/a/Wind_measurement

One thing I did notice in the alltime log was that when some of the records were broken you seemed to have had some odd readings - the famous Fine Offset 'spikes', possibly. I can't explain why those didn't also make it into the monthly all-time figures, but you may want to look into the spike removal settings on the calibration screen in Cumulus.

GM Steve

I calculated the wind speed multiplier as 1.316 from the formula you gave me and restarted Cumulus again. I left the wind gust multiplier at 1.

This morning, after Cumulus updated the data from my station, I had the attached screen showing some rain during the night since midnight (Today = 1.2mm) but the Last 24 hrs total as 533.1mm! There was no rain here yesterday between when I restarted Cumulus and midnight so the reading should be the same as today's total.

Taking your advice about the Fine Offset spikes, I changed the Max Rain Rate and Max Hourly Rain in the Spike Removal screen to 25 and started Cumulus again in the belief it would read the data from my weather station console collected since I did the first restart yesterday, but read and calculate it correctly, but it will not read the old data from the console. Is there a way I can get it to do this, please? I have the 'use data logger' option checked in the station configuration screen.

Something odd must be happening when you start Cumulus up for the first time having deleted the old data - I assume you did that? It calculates the last 24 hours rain based on the difference between the value of the rain counter in the station now and 24 hours ago. When you start Cumulus for the first time, it detects that this is case, and sets the current counter to whatever the station's counter is and then works from there. Presumably 533.1 is the current counter in the station, and it looks like it logged a value of zero 24 hours ago. There's no setting you can make to prevent the 'last 24 hours' value doing odd things when the station's counter does odd things (as it often does with Fine Offset stations), unfortunately. Cumulus tries to cope with that for all of the other calculated rain values, either automatically or by using the 'spike removal' settings.

I don't follow what it is you are expecting Cumulus to do regarding downloading logger data from the console. Are you saying that you closed it down for a while, but it didn't download the data from the logger to fill in the intervening period?

If you zip up the diags folder and attach it I'll be able to see what's happened in regard to the rain counter. But note that the 'last 24 hours' figure will correct itself at some point, after the old rain counter value causing the problem is more than 24 hours old.

Sorry Steve, perhaps I didn't explain very clearly.

Yes, I started Cumulus again after deleting the data in the data and diags folders, but I didn't delete the data in my weather station console. When I started Cumulus again, I thought it would download the data still in the console. rather than ignore this and start everything from scratch.

Flosex

When it starts up for the first time (which is the same as when all the data has been deleted) it starts recording from that point in time. This is intentional for reasons of 'safety' to avoid complications. Unless you 'fiddle' it. See http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/a/FAQ#I.E2.8 ... er_station

Thanks again Steve. After reading that, I have decided not to try it!

I will see if the rain readings go right this time, in which case I won't worry you again.

I am very impressed with your software and with your quick and helpful responses to my questions, and have just made an initial donation.

Flosex