I thought I would be the first to post in this forum.
I have been using the plug-in since John released the first beta. It has been working great throughout the development. Offering a local dat option for the devices supported in the ObserverIP gives me the peace of mind to know that values will be current for three critical devices used for home automation.
We now use the luminance device from our PWS to determine outside lighting. It is proving to be much more reliable and consistently accurate than the Aeotec Z-Wave multi-sensors we were using. It took me a couple of days of charting luminance to see the values being reported. I then used the values I determined to be correct for determining "Low Light" through a virtual device. This device is turned on when outside light drops below a certain value and it will stay on until the luminance rises substantially above that minimum. The range between the two values, stops the lighting from being controlled too frequently. We have been experiencing a lot of storms over the last week or so and our living area lighting has been near perfect. As soon as the level triggers the Low LIght device, our living area lighting is turned on and basement motion controlled lighting is enabled. Surprisingly, this is approved of and appreciated by my wife.
We use the rain values to determine irrigation schedules. We were using the weather devices from our PWS on Weather Underground. This works well, but is still dependent on an Internet connection. We don't worry too much about Internet as we have not had any outages this year and only one very brief one last year. Nevertheless, I prefer to keep as much local as I can.
We were looking each morning at the value for "Rain Yesterday" to adjust our schedules. We can set our irrigation schedule to every day, every other day, every 3 days, or every 4th day. I use a counter that is incremented, left the same or decremented based on yesterday's rain. That counter determines the days since last run in order to evaluate whether today is an irrigation day. Since Yesterday's Rain is the total accumulation of rain for the day, it is an excellent value to look at. If we had sufficient rain yesterday to negate the need for irrigation today, the counter is manipulated accordingly. With no rain it is incremented, with up to .1" of rain yesterday the counter is incremented, with .1-.25" the counter is left alone, with .25-.5" it is decremented and with over .5" it is set to -1. This system actually works much better and more consistently that our ground moisture sensors. We irrigate during the night, beginning well after sunset. Even if it is a sche!
duled irrigation day, they will not run if today's rain exceeds .25" and they will be stopped if it exceeds .25" while running.
This new plug-in is great, but Ambient does not provide rain yesterday, only today, the week, the month or total. While I could have changed my events to look at today's rain totals at 11:55 each night, we still wanted a rain yesterday device to look at. I created a Yesterdays Rain virtual device and a simple event to set yesterdays rain to today's rain each night at 11:50PM. The ObserverIP resets todays rain each night at midnight. The virtual device is built to match the plug-in device in terms of values and graphics. I used Jon00's device grouping script to put the virtual device in the same group as the plug-in devices.
The Event to update the virtual device just runs an immediate script where 8761 is the RefID of the "Today's Rain" device and 8859 is the RefID of the virtual device.
I have been using the plug-in since John released the first beta. It has been working great throughout the development. Offering a local dat option for the devices supported in the ObserverIP gives me the peace of mind to know that values will be current for three critical devices used for home automation.
We now use the luminance device from our PWS to determine outside lighting. It is proving to be much more reliable and consistently accurate than the Aeotec Z-Wave multi-sensors we were using. It took me a couple of days of charting luminance to see the values being reported. I then used the values I determined to be correct for determining "Low Light" through a virtual device. This device is turned on when outside light drops below a certain value and it will stay on until the luminance rises substantially above that minimum. The range between the two values, stops the lighting from being controlled too frequently. We have been experiencing a lot of storms over the last week or so and our living area lighting has been near perfect. As soon as the level triggers the Low LIght device, our living area lighting is turned on and basement motion controlled lighting is enabled. Surprisingly, this is approved of and appreciated by my wife.
We use the rain values to determine irrigation schedules. We were using the weather devices from our PWS on Weather Underground. This works well, but is still dependent on an Internet connection. We don't worry too much about Internet as we have not had any outages this year and only one very brief one last year. Nevertheless, I prefer to keep as much local as I can.
We were looking each morning at the value for "Rain Yesterday" to adjust our schedules. We can set our irrigation schedule to every day, every other day, every 3 days, or every 4th day. I use a counter that is incremented, left the same or decremented based on yesterday's rain. That counter determines the days since last run in order to evaluate whether today is an irrigation day. Since Yesterday's Rain is the total accumulation of rain for the day, it is an excellent value to look at. If we had sufficient rain yesterday to negate the need for irrigation today, the counter is manipulated accordingly. With no rain it is incremented, with up to .1" of rain yesterday the counter is incremented, with .1-.25" the counter is left alone, with .25-.5" it is decremented and with over .5" it is set to -1. This system actually works much better and more consistently that our ground moisture sensors. We irrigate during the night, beginning well after sunset. Even if it is a sche!
duled irrigation day, they will not run if today's rain exceeds .25" and they will be stopped if it exceeds .25" while running.
This new plug-in is great, but Ambient does not provide rain yesterday, only today, the week, the month or total. While I could have changed my events to look at today's rain totals at 11:55 each night, we still wanted a rain yesterday device to look at. I created a Yesterdays Rain virtual device and a simple event to set yesterdays rain to today's rain each night at 11:50PM. The ObserverIP resets todays rain each night at midnight. The virtual device is built to match the plug-in device in terms of values and graphics. I used Jon00's device grouping script to put the virtual device in the same group as the plug-in devices.
The Event to update the virtual device just runs an immediate script where 8761 is the RefID of the "Today's Rain" device and 8859 is the RefID of the virtual device.
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