I am wondering if anyone thinks a weather station that can be integrated with HE would be realtime enough to use to determine if a retractable awning should come in or not? My Somfy Eolis 3D wind sensor seems to have died - no longer brings in the awning - and I've always wanted a weather station anyway. Anyone have any experiences along these lines? I'd need to trigger on wind speed which preferably would be local and realtime. Possible?
I’m sure others will chime in too, but i’d look into ecowitt weather stations and the hubitat integration with their products.
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My only experience with retracting awnings is on RVs and campers. I've seen several of them get ripped off/damaged by a quick gust of wind... usually when unattended but sometimes when the owners present are but a rogue gust gets the best of it. For this style of awning, I'm not sure i could ever be comfortable trusting automation to keep it save from damage.
+1 on the ecowitt. Absolutely totally reliable in the 3 years I've had one. (and shoutout to @sburke781 for maintaining it!). You can pull windgust data out of it (I think) which is more important for blinds.
However if you are using it for this purpose you'll probably need to install it close to your awnings and not where it should normally be (at least 3m up in open space).
TBH nothing will protect you against a rogue gust. But at least the system should retract when things start getting a little wilder than usual.
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You can also set your Hubitat to respond to a lower wind gust that you would truly have to worry about.
One of the first rules I made was watching my Ambient/Ecowitt driver for wind gusts so that I could shut off our Christmas inflatables if it got too windy. It was originally via their API only but once Ecowitt's GW1000 became available local support was added for that and then local mode for the Ambient directly. The API is pretty irrelevant nowadays versus getting the data directly.
One thing to keep in mind is the interval you set your Ecowitt to send data to your Hubitat. It will send it every X seconds you configure. So if you have it set for 300 seconds you will get the data in 5 minute intervals... no sooner, no matter how much you might want to be alerted to something.
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That's one of the good things about the ecowitt. I had a Netatmo before which was a beautifully made (and looking) weather system. But the update interval was factory set at 10 mins which you only could change to 5. Which isn't useful for this purpose at all.
I use a tempest weather station tied to Hubitat to monitor wind. If wind exceeds a certain MPH I then retract our outdoor shades with a BOND integration to Somfy motors. It works decently but it won’t be as real-time as one of the Somfy sensors.
Years ago, we were dealers/installers for Sunsetter awnings, and used their wind sensor on our awning. It worked well but was based on the wind actually moving the awning (so basically a motion/vibration sensor). Today, we have no awning at this property (and sold the company that had that dealership) but we have an Ecowitt weather station and use the driver from @sburke781 , which works perfectly. I would not hesitate to use it, working with a Hubitat hub, to automatically retract an awning when the wind picked up. The key will be getting the hub to talk to the awning motor, I suspect.
@wiegout I have a Weatherflow that I've been really happy with. While we don't have a retractable awning, we do use it to trigger notifications to put down the patio umbrellas as well as to close the windows (and which window is open) should it start raining.
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I have that connection using a Bond Hub which talks to the Somfy RTS system so I have that handled. I have so many rules around deciding whether to extend/retract the awning. The stupid wind/vibration sensor breaking - and the ridiculous price of it - got me to thinking about doing the weather station instead.
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To retract it, I'd probably look at sustained wind over a certain level, or gusts over a different level. But then you get heavy rain, hail, etc... I saw our Sunsetter endure torrential downpours with no ill effects, though.
Are you still using this? I had never thought of that, but that would be a great idea! If you dont mind, I would love to see it.
I have no idea why I never realized i could do something like this! Thanks!
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That happens all the time to me. But this particular Rule was one of the first things I did when coming to Hubitat because it was something I had wanted to do on my previous system but could not.
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