Cumulus Support

hell again everyone,
i have just recently started my new weather underground station setup, its brilliant!
i was just wondering if i need to keep the computer left on all the time as i am worried that it will cause a fire risk as it is a laptop with a charger that gets warm in operation, I normally turn the laptop off during the night to A: save the battery and B: to prevent a fire risk as the charger is on all day.
when the laptop is shut down, it results in cumulus thinking that it is the previous day, when it is actually the day after, for example, if it was turned on on the 6th april, and turned off that evening, i would then turn it on on the 7th and cumulus would think it is still the day before.
any help is greatly appreciated
tom

https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/IHEREF22

Cumulus is designed on the basis that it works best if it is operating continuously, so it can interrogate the weather station at maximum frequency and has least risk of missing extreme measurements. All the derived calculations (maximum and minimum in a day, apparent temperature, average temperature,and many more will be more accurately calculated if based on the most possible measurements at consistent intervals.

That said, many Cumulus users do turn their devices off when they are not around, to save energy or reduce fire risk; and accept that the quality of the derivatives output is poorer and that some extremes may be missed, some averages might be biased etc. When Cumulus is restarted, if the weather station it is talking to has retained measurements in a logger, Cumulus will read these, and so, yes it starts off with whatever day it was when you turned it off. Cumulus can only roll over to next day when it has finished reading logger results form previous day and starts with those to assign to new day.

I hope that is enough to answer your questions, but ask again if I have not covered all you need to know, or look in the Wiki to see if that answers your question.

The only thing I should perhaps add, is that you might, in longer term, wish to consider moving from Cumulus 1 to MX. Then consider after that, a move to a different device that consumes less power and presents less of a fire risk. MX now offers more functionality than Cumulus 1, so it might well be of benefit in other ways.

I presume the OP is using Cumulus1 which has a station setting to Use data logger. Check that to make sure it is ticked (enabled) so that Cumulus can do what sfws explained.

Enjoy,
Paul

Since I helped you get this going then I KNOW the answer to your question is yes you MUST otherwise you are going to miss readings. You are using a Smartweather program that is updating the .dat interface to Cumulus 1 and it has NO means of logging data, so if you do not do this you will lose data.

My mistake, I forgot your previous posts, and gave a general answer. Of course Water01 is absolutely right, in your case you only capture data form your weather station when Cumulus is running. He told you that in the earlier thread viewtopic.php?f=4&t=17936&p=140046, both your weather station and Cumulus must be kept running.

I recall now you said you had left your SmartWeather at its default 30 minute between updates, and Water01 commented

water01 wrote: ↑Fri 03 Apr 2020 11:28 am 30 minutes seems a long time?

I suggest you reduce that to say every 5 minutes, then Cumulus has a much better chance of not missing extremes. Temperature or wind for example can change a lot in 30 minutes. Less than 2 minutes is probably not helpful for your station, it might take around a minute to process what it gets from its sensors, so Water01's suggestions of seconds between .dat saves in that post is a non-runner.

Just to reassure @TomWilliams2000 I have been running Cumulus1 continuously for 11 years on the same netbook. I set the power so the screen turns off when the lid is closed meaning power consumption is very low. The fan failed a couple of months ago but fortunately there is an excellent repair shop in Stockport that replaced it. I'm on my second battery probably because I run it 95% on power. A more even mixture would extend the battery life. Never even considered it a fire risk.

You'll get far fewer problems by leaving it running 24/7. I get the occasional hiccup usually when the station needs cleaning but that is soon sorted. It might be the middle of the night for you but someone in the world will click on your station site and hope to see current weather.