Cumulus Support

I am pretty sure I've read somewhere that when you change measurements in Cumulus something weird happens to the recorded figures. As its a new year I decided to change from recording rainfall from inches to mm and after the change Cumulus was showing rainfall for the day, month, year as 666mm, can I change this, or is better to leave it and let nature change it for me when it rains next?

Changing units invalidates all of your existing data (for rain, in this case) and is unsupported. You may be able to change today's rain using the editor in Cumulus and then restarting to correct the monthly and annual totals; Cumulus won't correct it, even when it rains. To change your existing data, highs and lows, etc you would need to multiply all of your rain figures in all of the Cumulus files in the data folder by 25.4.

Pants!!! Blown that then!! What would happen if I changed back to inches...more confusion? Does this mean that all the records for the past year have been mangles as well?

Kafinater wrote:Pants!!! Blown that then!! What would happen if I changed back to inches...more confusion?

If you've had no rain today and you change back now, you might be OK.

Does this mean that all the records for the past year have been mangles as well?

Nothing has happened to them. Your rain was logged in in inches. Having changed to mm, Cumulus now thinks they were logged in mm. So, without actually having been changed, they are all now far too low.

By way of explanation: The data is logged in the units you have chosen. This means that if you load the files into Excel or whatever, you can use them exactly as they are in your chosen units.

If I had originally sat down with the intention of writing software that was going to be used by thousands of people, in different units, and made it completely flexible, I would probably have chosen to store the data in a fixed set of units and then do the conversions as necessary for display. As I did for Cumulus 2, in fact.

But for the original Cumulus, I didn't; which is why there are warnings in the readme.txt, in the wiki, and even on the settings screen itself, that changing your units will invalidate your existing data.