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@jeffhaas, I’m also in the SF Bay Area (south bay), and have found that the OpenWeatherMap forecast for Cupertino, Sunnyvale, and Los Altos simply reeks. It’s garbage; apparently OpenWeatherMap can’t handle the Bay Area’s microclimates. In my case, Monte Sereno is a reasonable approximation; certainly better than the forecasts for the cities I list above. I suggest you try nearby cities and zip codes; I had to go through half a dozen before I found one that worked.
It’s too bad that we’re stuck with a service that produces such crap, but that’s the way it is. Hope this helps.
@peter, there was no rain overnight in Cupertino. In fact, there’s been none this month.A bit of a difference? 20 F is a bit of a difference?
You’re right, I’m not running a nuclear reactor. What I’m running is an appliance that was advertised to adjust based on the weather.
Since WeatherUnderground is no longer available, it seems we’re stuck with OpenWeatherMap. And apparently for parts of Australia and certainly for my part of the US, OpenWeatherMap is useless.
Ray recommended I try nearby cities. Well, I tried 4 that are nearby, and NONE of them has a correct forecast on OWM; they’re all low by 10 to 20 F.
Yes, the Zimmerman model is running on predicted average temps, and the OWM predicted average temps for my area are consistently wrong. Garbage in gives you garbage out.
There’s no point in continuing this discussion. Unless OWM gets fixed (apparently about the same time Hell freezes over), I’m simply going to have to turn off the weather adjustment. And honestly, I’m no longer going to recommend OpenSprinkler to anyone.The Zimmerman formula doesn’t change the forecast, and the forecast is clearly wrong. If the forecast were consistently off by some amount, then changing the baseline temp would help. But it’s not; the error varies significantly from day to day, and neither linearly nor proportionally to the correct forecast. The only thing consistent about it is that it’s consistently wrong.
OpenWeatherMap is completely useless. Comparing OpenWeatherMap to the National Weather Service for my area, OpenWeatherMap is consistently forecasting temperatures 10-20 degrees F below the NWS forecast. And the NWS forecast has been quite accurate. As a consequence, my watering has been in single-digit percentage, while the temperature here has soared.
I’ve reported this discrepancy to both OpenThings.io (Samer) and to OpenWeatherMap (Pavel Zuykov) more than a month ago, but there’s no change–the forecast shown on my OpenSprinkler continues to be well below the NWS, WeatherUnderground, WeatherChannel, and just about any other source I can find.
What exactly does it take to get this fixed? Is there no alternative possible to OpenWeatherMap?
