ETo adjustment suddenly going to 0% (after a year of working great)

[Joel Snyder]

Hi there.

I have been using the ETo water level on our OpenSprinkler hardware.
App version: 2.4.49
Firmware: 2.2.1
Hardware Version: 3.2-AC

Suddenly, a few days ago, the ETo went to 0%. It’s never done this before.
I was using the Default(Apple) provider, so yesterday I changed providers (to Pirate Weather) assuming that there was some issue with Apple. Immediately, the ETo went to about 70%.

However, last night, the ETo went to 0% again.

I tried rebooting and turning off-on ETo, and it always goes back to 0%.

Nothing has changed in the network or configuration; in fact, we have been out of town for 2 weeks so I am doing all of this remotely via a VPN.

Any ideas on how to debug or solve this?

[D N]

It is possible that you have the same problem I have with Apple where the Weather Service returns “Error” and the Last Response is “Weather Data Error”. If you check the System Diagnostics in the left menu, do you have errors like this?

If you do have this problem, in a support ticket Ray suggested I export the configuration. Then check the value of “wterr” in the JSON output. For me it’s almost always “1”. The weather service in the past few months has only been working occasionally. Before that it had always been reliable.

[Ray]

The firmware always resets the watering level to 100% before sending out a weather query so it shouldn’t get stuck in 0% — usually if it’s stuck at 0%, it’s because the weather algorithm returned 0% to the firmware.

One example of how ETo will return 0% is if there is significant precipitation. The formula of ETo is explained in our support article:
https://openthings.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000823370-use-weather-adjustments
as you can see if there is significant precipitation it can cause ETo to become 0%.

[Joel Snyder]

Thanks for the pointers. It does occasionally rain in Tucson, and it actually did rain about a 1/10 of an inch last week, so perhaps I am being alarmist. I’ll wait for things to dry out and turn it back on and see. I believe that we have never actually seen 0% in Tucson and certainly not after just a little bit of rain but that’s certainly a very good hypothesis. I will check the logs and exports and report back here. Thanks all again for the help! Joel

[Ray]

The weather server returns the weather data used for the ETo calculation, and the firmware stores it. You can check the ‘wtdata’ field in the /ja (JSON all) endpoint to see what data it used that resulted in the 0% calculation.

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