Personal Weather Stations (PWS) & Rachio

What kind of PWS integration is available?

The Aeris weather service can receive weather observations from two types of weather stations:

1. Official weather stations - government-sponsored weather stations, typically located in airports. Aeris provides this data as part of its weather feed, and Rachio's Weather Intelligence and Seasonal Adjustment features use this information.
   
   
2. PWS that reports to the WeatherUnderground network, which is a joint venture between Aeris and WeatherForYou.com. This network supports tens of thousands of PWS's across the world, as well as near 'real-time' reporting. Additionally, the weather data from each station is hosted at wunderground.com and  WeatherForYou.com for consumption in any web browser.
   
   Aeris can optionally provide these weather observations as part of its feed. Since this data isn't as reliable as the official weather stations, we allow our users to decide whether they want to use it or not.

But I should always be using local PWS data to get the most accurate weather information, right?

Not necessarily. There are a lot of PWS out there, and if the station nearest you is set up correctly, calibrated properly, and maintained regularly, that hyper-local data can give you better performance for your Rachio controller. Unfortunately, in a small percentage of cases the PWS nearest you may be unreliable, or not set up correctly, and give false readings. We are constantly looking for these stations, and notifying our weather provider about them to get them fixed or removed from the feed. When WeatherUnderground stations are added to the mix, opening the system up to tens of thousands more stations, the opportunity for more local data increases, but so does the chance of coming across a bad station (a mixed blessing for sure).

So, for those who are looking for the absolute most up-to-date and local data while willing to risk some bad data, a PWS is the way to go. If you're more concerned with consistency & reliability, you may want to skip the PWS and put your trust in the official weather station for your area.

PWS not showing on your Rachio's list? 

A new station will build up its trust factor in 3-4 days, assuming it is providing accurate data regularly, however, this process can take up to 16 days.

Stations that provide data that does not pass quality control will take longer to rebuild the trust factor based on how long it has sent faulty information. We currently evaluate temperature, dew point, humidity, and wind values when determining whether or not an observation passes quality control.