I stumbled recently over a rule not firing when I expected - turned out to be a discrepency between sunrise times and I won't go into details.
Today, for a completely different reason I needed to use Sunrise for a trigger - but which sunrise? I have OpenWeather Maps in a dashboard and it says 5:50a. HE settings says 5:53a. When I asked Alexa she said '5:57 AM' (it was wierd - it depended on how it was asked). and finally a google for sunrise in my city said "5:52am (tomorrow)".
I downloaded an app and expected somehow had done detailed analysis - and the app said '5:54am'.
Has anyone done detailed research on a definitive source of Sunrise (and the brother - Sunset).
I know that the hub loves to place my home about 4 miles from where it actually is. Check your lat/long. As you already know sunrise/sunset is based on latitude/longitude, and if inaccurate you sunrise/sunset will be off.
I saw calculators online to calculate sunrise/sunset based on longitud latitude, but not sure how HE does it.
At the end of the day +/- a few minutes doesn't bother me that much, but to each his own.
PS-I use the HE dashboard app to set my location, since my zipcode(what HE uses?) is shared by 2 distinct towns, and no I don't live in the sticks
I'm lucky enough to live in a single zipcoded area thats not large - the variation is teeny tiny - I actually checked it but in my case, I was trying to get Alexa routines to syncronize with HE routines and just couldn't get them to line up. If I take Alexa's value, and somehow pass it back into he in a driver I guess I could do it that way but man would it be a lot easier if both pulled from a single source. I checked NOAA, thinking they may be a difinitive, but they don't provide an API that I'm aware of. I was thinking I might just use a fairly well known Alexa app and be done with it.
(Sunrise Sunset - by Revel Software )
In an age where we know the rainfall to a 100th of an inch, not being able to get consistent SR/SS data just seems ridiculous to me..
Furthering my whining - its like the CT values of light bulbs. Can't get HE, Amazon and Google all to agree on a simple 'Soft White'. Frustrating!