@Bieniu
For garden watering systems, it would especially useful to provide the precipitation past 6 hours value, to decide wether watering or not the garden. AccuWeather provides this information…
Many thanks.
You already raised a post on this one…it is not clear what you want… what is ‘past 6’
Is that IN 6 hours from now, past 6-o’clock, or 18:00 … any timeframe?
The accuwaether forecast does present the value in 6 hours and if not too fa off also at 6 clock. You first need to create that forecast sensor (loads of other posts, I will not repeat) and then you can use a template to get either o both these vaues out.
@vingerha According to the API information it is the “PrecipitationSummary.Past6Hours” The amount of precipitation (liquid equivalent) that has fallen in the past 6 hours. Contains Metric and Imperial Values. And you can find it in the “Curreent Conditions”, it is not a forecast.
Tanks.
Clearer now, message is to not expect everyone to dive into finding details of your issue
So you want to retrieve an existing value that is not covered by the current integration.
If you have the means/knowledge you could create the alternate code and present this as a PR…else…wait (may never be delivered)
Is there a way to learn how to create an alernate code?
Sorry for my lack of experience in HASS
Not sure how to answer this. … Accuweather is part of the HA core package so you would have to jump quite a few few hoops. To be frank, these hoops are not the easy ones as HA protects its base quite good (and with good reason) but if there is a larger benefit…
Home Assistant Developer Docs | Home Assistant Developer Docs (home-assistant.io)
EDIT: unless you are a seasoned developer you are best served with this request…
To make this more attractive… are there any other similar values? next 3-6-9-12 hours …etc?
Yes there are!!
AccuWeather APIs | Current Conditions
And for example, in the same Current Conditions, there is the HasPrecipitation which can be true or false. If it’s true, the you have the value, type and units. Currently HASS shows only the units which is quite useless, right?, but not the value. To get the value there is a special sensor, which is sort of redundant, since you could get the value form the main entity attributes !! It would be nice to suggest to change this and get the main entity attribute…
I do get all of that but you have to make this precise… I work in IT and review ideas all the time and if not precise…no clue what to do > reject. If you know of attributes that would bring value: exactly (!) specify them. Do note that people are mostly not paid so if you want attention…shorten the effort.
If the integration supports entity descriptions (AccuWeather does), adding new sensors is quite simple. Look here Add separate entities for temperature, humidity and pressure in AccuWeather integration by bieniu · Pull Request #125041 · home-assistant/core · GitHub
Well, I think I made it precise, add “PrecipitationSummary.Past6Hours” under current conditions:
The amount of precipitation (liquid equivalent) that has fallen in the past 6 hours. Contains Metric and Imperial Values. And you can find it in the “Curreent Conditions”.
Because on top of knowing whether it rains or not, it would be nice to know the accumulated amount of water at least for the past 6 hours.
@Bieniu I understand what you mean and it is quite interesting, the only problem is to add all these sensors to cards, it might be painful. If you have most of them in the main entity, then you simplify the display…
In any case, under your specification, it might be very nice to be able to have all the rain data as sensors disabled by default:
PrecipitationSummary.Past3Hours
PrecipitationSummary.Past6Hours
PrecipitationSummary.Past9Hours
PrecipitationSummary.Past12Hours
PrecipitationSummary.Past18Hours
PrecipitationSummary.Past24Hours
Can you confirm me that the precipitation sensor provided by the integration corresponds to “PrecipitationSummary.PastHour” ?
Just to give you an example, today it has rained all the morning, but not in the evening, so the water system, which will start soon, will decide to water the garden because it hasn’t rained in the past hour…
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we should add more entities to the integration just because we can. New entities need to bring value. HA is an automation platform and I honestly don’t see how you can use a set of 6 new entities in automation if values some of them partially overlap.
Add one of them, maybe, all of them, to me it doesn’t make sense.
Confirmed
Why is this description not in the open post? The more precisely you describe the feature and provide examples of its use, the more people will vote for it and the greater the chance that someone will devote their free time to implement the feature. It’s simple, if you want someone to devote their time, then you first devote yours and explain exactly what it is about
@Bieniu Then just add the PrecipitationSummary.Past6Hours.
You might agree with me that just having the last hour is not enough for the watering system to decide whether to water or not?
This is one of my first HASS suggestions, and I’m not familiar with the system and processes, sorry
Different users, different wishes …it is a feature request and indeed @jmfargas please change the title / description as people should not need to read through a whole bunge of posts. My proposal would be to add these as attributes to 1 new entity or an existing one
I just checked current accu sensors and there are plenty similar ones which, to me, also donot make sense. 5 x sensor.home_condition_day_, same 5 for night, 5 x sensor.home_hours_of_sun_, etc. With that I assume it is ‘common’ practice to split them out and not put them in 1 entity as per my previous suggestion.
I don’t see the reason why you would put in sensors for historical values?
If you have an actual precipitation sensor then you also have the history in HA and can therefore calculate the past 6 hours (or whatever timeframe you want).
Just adding even more sensors to provide something HA already has seems strange.
It is not history…it is forecast.
As with the OP, I too have a automated watering system in the garden and depending on predicted rainfall I can switch it on … or wait for the rain.
And multiple predictions do help. i.e. my irrigation runs either early morning or late evening as it is too hot during the day.
Example: if 6:00 is the time to start irrigation then I would like to know the predicted rainfall in 12 or 18 hours (next moment the irrigation starts)
OP wrote “precipitation past 6 hours value” so it’s history. He’s not looking into the future, he wanted to know the amount of rain in the last 6 hours.
If you want the future then you have the forecast which can be hourly and again you don’t need additional sensors for this, just to extract it.
@gjohansson Youy are right, PrecipitationSummary.Past6Hours is history, but since AccuWeather provides it with the Current Conditions, it would be very useful to have it. The big problem, using the history of the sensor, is that the old values might be quite wrong! Why, just because inaccuracy of AccuWeather data!! Sometimes I have seen that the updated values are more correct than the old ones, so adding the past values during 6 hours might give a very different number than using the Past6Hours value, unfortunately, because the data gets corrected over time. So this is why is so important to have the current updated values at the time of the reading…