Cumulus Support

The wind info displaying in Cumulus bears little relation to what's showing on my console.

My console has been reading wind speeds between 5.4 and 6.9
over the past few minutes but Cumulus is showing a latest wind speed of 13 mph and an average of 12.4, The Cumulus numbers haven't budged as the console numbers have changed, but Cumulus' numbers seem closer to the wind speeds I'm actually feeling here.

The other weird thing is that the wind direction on both the console and Cumulus show NW even though the wind has been out of the S/SW. It's accurately reflected wind direction in the past, so I'm pretty sure it's not somehow mounted backwards or anything.

As background, I've had a number of problems over the past month or so. At first I just stopped being able to transmit to Wunderground, and then Cumulus quit working completely getting hung up on opening, with a “Downloading Data Please Wait,” message. I've twice cleared rebooted the console and cleared the memory to fix that issue.

I also suspect I've been getting more rain than what's registered, but don't know how to figure that out without buying a separate rain gauge to check it.

I'm hoping someone might have some ideas since the guy at Ambient finally gave up and suggested I try here.

dsenior wrote:My console has been reading wind speeds between 5.4 and 6.9
over the past few minutes but Cumulus is showing a latest wind speed of 13 mph and an average of 12.4, The Cumulus numbers haven't budged as the console numbers have changed, but Cumulus' numbers seem closer to the wind speeds I'm actually feeling here.

You're probably comparing 'speeds' with 'gusts'. see http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/a/FAQ#What_d ... tations.3F

Cumulus quit working completely getting hung up on opening, with a “Downloading Data Please Wait,” message. I've twice cleared rebooted the console and cleared the memory to fix that issue.

Your station memory probably didn't contain the values that Cumulus was expecting; or possibly it just stopped sending data. If it happens again, zip up the diags folder and upload it.

That helped -- I had Cumulus set to calculate a 10 minute average, but the console calculates 3 min averages. I took that setting off and now they're in sync. Thank you!

Any thoughts about the wind direction?

dsenior wrote:Any thoughts about the wind direction?

I'm afraid not, since Cumulus is displaying the same as the console. Someone else might have some suggestions - but Fine Offset wind vanes do tend to flap around a lot. Or perhaps you have some sort of local effect causing changes in the wind direction - is your wind vane well exposed?

dsenior wrote:The other weird thing is that the wind direction on both the console and Cumulus show NW even though the wind has been out of the S/SW. It's accurately reflected wind direction in the past, so I'm pretty sure it's not somehow mounted backwards or anything.

Check that it is mounted right and/or not broken. I had mine spin around on the pole in a storm and had to fix it.
Also, you may get wind disturbance from that direction (as Steve suggested) and cause it to flap around as these units only give the direction that it is facing at the time of the transmission and the last 47 seconds on wind direction do not count.

Hi,

Can you visually check that the wind vane really is pointing to the NW? However, this is not easy (even if you take the console outdoors) as the vane can swing around a lot and the transmitter only sends a "snapshot" of its position once every 48 seconds.

If the vane position is now being misreported then it's possible that a bad electrical contact has increased the circuit resistance (the directions are coded by different electrical resistances). But if the additional resistance is sufficiently high (tens of kilohms) to cause SW to be reported as NW then it will NEVER report any directions to the East or South.

BTW if you only had the "10 minute average" flag set and not the "use speed...." flag set then Cumulus was reporting (and logging) the average of the gusts, which can be well above the normal average wind speed. This caught me out a few weeks ago when I found that my sum of "average" wind speeds in the log over 24 hours was far higher than the corresponding "wind run".

Cheers, Alan.

Actually, it looks like one of the connections was loose. We resecured that and it seems to be mostly right -- although, as you said, it does flap around a lot!

Thanks to everyone for the thoughts and suggestions.