Cumulus Support

I installed Cumulus MX yesterday, adding in all my old data from Cumulus 1. Everything generally went without a hitch, apart from a strange anomaly with the rainfall counter - what was reported as 30.45in in Cumulus 1 AND on the Davis VP2 console was showing as 38.67in in Cumulus MX (causing all sorts of fun with the records, I suddenly had 8.22in of rain falling at once).

I couldn't find any reason for this to have happened, so I reset the rain the counter via the interface, and manually corrected the data/ini files this morning. Everything looked fine again.

Today, it's rained. Davis console reports 0.27in of rain; Cumulus MX says 0.35in... again it's too high, and it looks like is the same % increase, around 27%. There's definitely no '1.27' multiplier set in config anywhere that I can see. The only thing I can think of is related to the rain collector configuration, I recall it can be set to either 0.2mm or 0.01in... and the latter is 1.27 times the former... could this be it?

Regards,
Gerard.
http://www.musburyvillage.co.uk/weather

Do you have a metric rain gauge (despite using inches in Cumulus)?

In converting the number of gauge clicks to actual amounts, I have assumed that people using MM in Cumulus have a metric rain gauge, and those using inches have a 0.01" rain gauge. This can be over-ridden by adding a line to the [Station] section of Cumulus.ini:

VPrainGaugeType=0

Where 0 is a 0.2mm gauge and 1 is a 0.01" gauge.

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the quick reply. Yes, it's a metric VP which I choose to display in imperial. Old fashioned

I tried setting VPrainGaugeType=0 which appeared to make no difference on restart.

Just to be sure, I set VPrainGaugeType=1 and restarted, and it made a right mess of the rainfall records again

I've now put it back to VPrainGaugeType=0, and just had a look at the log files; rain counter is at 30.73 which is CORRECT. It says the day start value was 30.38, which is wrong - it was 30.46 at the start of the day. Seems to have gone backwards. Maybe it will sort itself by tomorrow. Will investigate further later.

Thanks again for you help.

I'm curious as to why you have your rain gauge set to metric, when you want to record in inches - wouldn't it be logical to have the gauge record in the same units, to avoid conversion and rounding issues?