What is the best way to pull current weather data and forecasted highs and lows with Hubitat?
For current weather I'd want something I could poll at 10-to-15-minute intervals. Temps change fast in the mountains.
I use forecasted high and lows to run various thermostat changes for a day and current temps to turn / off vent fans.
For current weather conditions, I would recommend a weather station. I am biased towards the EcoWitt platform, as I own one and currently maintain the Custom driver, but other weather stations are available. One selling point for EcoWitt is that the data is sent directly to the HE hub by the EcoWitt system through a local connection, so it does not need to go via a cloud service for Hubitat to receive it. Additionally, EcoWitt can also send the weather conditions to their own cloud service for display in their own dashboard. plus services like Weather Underground. They also have display units that can receive and display dashboards with current conditions, if you would prefer a pre-built dashboard / display solution.
In terms of forecasting, I would suggest looking around at weather sites / services online that provide the forecast that most closely matches the forecast you most commonly rely upon. E.g. if you typically get your forecast from the local news, find an online source that has the same forecast. Then it's a matter of finding / building an integration. I can't help too much for forecasts in the States, but if open-meteo.com comes into consideration, I am going to look at it for a friend, so may be able to help out once I set something up.
It also depends on where you are. There are more options in the US but there are drivers that support some other (or global) APIs such as my Weather Service Monitor 4 Hubitat.
You can find a list of Community Drivers and it includes a whole section for Weather-related drivers. Although a lot of developers forget to add their drivers in there.
Thanks for the response… Right now I loaded the open weather map app. My token isn’t working yet, but I switched over to weather.gov and it seems fine.
In the past I’ve had issues with other systems having intermittent issues pulling timely updates…hopefully this is cleaner.
Thanks for the detailed answer. It does make a lot of sense to have an outdoor sensor for current temp. I’ve never used one but what could be more precise… And I can poll it as much as I want I’m assuming.
I’ve typically use the forecast, highs and lows for setting the modes of my thermostat,… if it’s 45° outside but the high is going to be 75 there’s not much reason to turn the heater on at 7am.
You can also user the Wunderground driver, but yeah a weatherstation (I use a Tempest Weatherflow with @snell 's driver) and Wunderground combined are pretty powerful
Available Wunderground data
Thanks! That helps a lot!
I just discovered open-meteo.com this morning, after wiring a driver for MeteoMatics yesterday:
[RELEASE] MeteoMatics integration
Open-meteo.com seems to have a far more extensive list of metrics that are available, with lots of historical data (which is what I am interested in collecting, rather than forecasts).
Have you started looking at open-meteo.com ? It will probably become one of my pet projects in the very near future.
No, not yet. Happy to let you take the keys, I was only looking at it for a friend.
What kind of data is your friend looking for ? Maybe the MeteoMatics driver answers their question.
My own primary interests are recording the amount of rain fall, snow fall, wind speeds, cloud coverage, sunlight, maybe air quality...
I'll dig out the conversation we had sometime in the next week and let you know
My interest in open-meteo has just dipped now that I see the historical data is only for 2 or 5 days (depending on the paragraph I read) before today or earlier... for recent days, they only have past forecasts, not actual data... far less than ideal. It seems great for someone who wants to download a bunch of data from the past and make analysis, not that great for an automation platform to make decisions, or even to collect data since it's not even remotely current data
I also found the documentation a little vague or at least hard to definitively say whether a forecast or actual results are being returned. Forecast results may be useful for display on a dashboard though.... But if you've got something else you are happy with, then I'd stick with that.
MeteoMatics (see my integration above) seems to provide actual recent data (24h precipitation in particular, is what I am most looking for). OpenWeather Map provides forecasts for the coming days.
As for open-meteo, it provides actual conditions (not forecast) only when it is no longer relevant, so I don't find it that useful. My use-case is being able to make some decisions on when to water the garden or not. (yes, I know it would be much more precise to use soil moisture meters from Ecowitt).
One day....
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