Recommendation on HE integrated Weather Station with rain gauge

I know that this question has been asked before but... I wanted to get an up-to-date take on what is available for HE integrated weather stations that have rain gauges. I live in the "rainiest city" in the U.S. and rainfall (and when it is actively raining) is important to my automations. I would like to be able to accurately use "when it is actively raining and when its not" to control various automations. I prefer not to have a lot of moving parts in between the Weather station and HE for simplicity and reliability.

I love the Davis weather products but they don't seem to integrate well with HE.

Does anybody have any suggestions?

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There's no native driver, but I'm using an Ambient Weather WS-2000 myself (and I'm sure they have other models that would work, too--on the device side, you'd just need one with the little--or big, really--rain-catcher/gauge thingie). I know there is at least one community driver for this, and I wrote my own that works with their new-ish poorly documented local API (not sure if the others need cloud, though that works too, or work by scraping data from a local source).

I'm not sure if/how the "is actively raining" thing is exposed from their API, as I'm not using it, but I can check that out to see if I can figure anything out. It's possible one of the existing community drivers already exposes this. I know the Home Assistant integration does, but I'm not sure if that's a cloud-only feature (which is how that integration works, perhaps surprisingly). It would probably be easy to calculate based on other numbers (e.g., rainfall rate--presumably 0 means it stopped, so a time since the last >0 value) if nothing else.

On a related note, I should say that I've been outside in light rain sometimes, and the station--or at least Home Assistant that I use to more easily visualize the data than either the Ambient Weather app or Hubitat--still happily reports that it's not raining. :slight_smile: I'm guessing that, like most electronic, self-empyting gauges, it will have to wait for 0.01" of rain before the tiny bucket fills and tips to register rain. Casusal Googling tells me light rain may be classified as "< 0.098 in per hour," so even at the maximum rate for light rainfall, it may still take over 6 minutes to get a report (and, of course, longer for light rain that isn't borderline moderate). Not exactly instant, but maybe close enough--just something to consider and something that has surprised me sometimes.

I'm sure you'll get other ideas, too. This is just something that I know works for me.

I just setup an ecowitt GW1100 gateway and a WH40 rain gauge and it went flawless.

It's cool that you can get by by buying only the pieces you want.

Thanks for the info. I am curious is it locally accessible from HE or does the API require a cloud connection?

Either is technically possible, at least if you have new-ish firmware on the base station. The driver I wrote is local. I'm not sure about any others.

Nice. Local would be great. What values do you get using your driver from the AWS?

Here's the raw-ish data I got from a recent "push" of this data to my hub:

tempinf:74.0, battin:1, humidityin:60, baromrelin:29.292, baromabsin:29.291, tempf:82.1, battout:1, humidity:43, winddir:98, winddir_avg10m:189, windspeedmph:0.0, windspdmph_avg10m:0.8, windgustmph:2.1, maxdailygust:4.3 hourlyrainin:0.000, eventrainin:0.000, dailyrainin:0.000, weeklyrainin:0.000, monthlyrainin:0.215, yearlyrainin:18.514, solarradiation:49.43, uv:1

I'm not using all of this information in my driver, as I just wrote it for myself and picked out the things I thought I might reasonably have a use for:

image

Turns out I'm not using much besides temperature and illuminance, but maybe some day. :slight_smile: The cloud API might have a bit more data, but I thought it was silly to send my own data back to the Internet just to get it to my hub (and to poll instead of push, but it turns out the base unit isn't that much smarter about pushing--it's also interval-based, and you can only configure it for one destination at a time).

You can use WeeWX for the integration.

@dennypage Interesting.... where do you run the WeeWX software?

It's written in Python, so you can run it on pretty much any *nix system you have around. Lot's of folks use a Raspberry Pi. People also use docker images as well.

Tempest weatherflow is something to check