I am a newbie in this fascinating field of meteorology, and just installed a Sky/Air set up; with respect to Air install I did find a location that will give me complete shade during daylight hours, but it was impossible to stay away from A/C compressors and pool pumps.
I live in Central Florida in a planned community whereas every household have a swimming pool (thus an outside pool pump) and central A/C systems, plus outside A/C compressors. The average compressor size is about 5 tons, and the pool pumps are at least 2 hp. The A/C compressors/cooling fans run 24 hours a day during summer and also during winter because they are of heat pump variety. The pool pumps are mostly run during day time hours.
My question is will the A/C compressors and pool pumps interfere with the Air lightning strike monitoring? From what I understand the pool pumps are brushless, so are the A/C compressors and its cooling fan are also brushless. My strike count is about 20-35/hour. Can anyone offer me any comments? My station ID is 10176… thanks.
Did you already saw false lighting reports ?
Since when is your station online ?
Normally, I would say, if everything is installed properly there shouldn’t be much false lightning reports. But my experience focusses European, or better say German conditions.
Maybe, someone form the US or better from Florida could answer more specific.
Thanks. I will try that, in addition I am siting a location in front of my house (facing westerly) that will give me shade during daytime hours and there are no pool pumps nor A/C compressors.
My lightning detection issue: I had my air installed for about a year with good lightning detection performance. Then, I started getting false alerts constantly, to the point that I had to disable lightning notifications altogether. We also had some intermittent power outages around the time this started, so I did some investigating and found some power lines with tree branches that would occasionally come into contact with the conductors about a block away from my house. Getting the power company out to fix that situation corrected both the power flickers and the false lightning detected by the air.
Interesting story! Glad you took action before those trees + power lines caused a fire ! Probably more common than most people realize. As said before, detecting the source of electrical pulses is often difficult. In a vast majority of cases we have investigated, there has been an environmental element like this triggering the lightning detector instead of the detector itself being faulty. Stay safe.
My Air and Sky have been online since I first put them up well over a year ago and for the most part I’ve not had any issues at all until a month or so ago. All of a sudden I’m seeing lightning detection nearly every day. I live in a part of California that almost never sees lighting. Nothing has changed as far as the mounting location or environment around my devices. Anyone have any ideas?
Also I can’t believe how long the batteries are lasting.
It may be a new electrical device in the vicinity.
I have pumps to process my borehole water and when they kick in several times a day I have a “lightning strike”.
Maybe somebody has added something close by?
David
Hi Tony,
It looks like the false positive strikes started occurring around early September. Interestingly they are all occurring around the same times every day. Can you think of anything that may have been moved closer or something new in the environment that could be causing the false positives? https://smartweather.weatherflow.com/station/2076/graph/3838/lightning/4
Okay, try rotating the AIR 90 degrees so the logo/ventilation openings face a different direction. Wait a day and see if the false positives stop. If not, rotate some more. Keep us posted!
Remember that lightning detection is not just a few yards around you but miles … even a bad designed transfo switch at 2 miles can trigger your device … more sophisticated devices detect at 5000 km …
As said try rotating the AIR, it is less sensitive on some sides and in many cases you can eliminate false positives.
When the false events are in a dedicated time window, it is possible a device uses in a special situation (a transformer, a motor, a power line, …) somewhere around got faulty. This makes the possibility to get rid of it quite difficult. But maybe, you get an idea by yourself or talking to neighbors.
A question that I did not see come up in this string,Does the unit settle in the longer you have it on? I have had the same issue as what rocket289k described on his units. I moved mine around the house, 50 feet from the house( wide open yard) and finally give up and turned off the lightning detection unless I new a storm was coming. My electrical lines are all buried as well as neighbors. I at first had thought it might be tied to outdoor wifi bulbs, but after moving to all corners of property have eliminated that thought. Will leave it on again for a day or two and see what happens. Mine averages around 60 strikes per 3 hours and they are all either 6-9 mile or 7-11 in strength. I am station 6792 Mooresville NC
No, it doesn’t settle in. You could have some device that turns itself on repeatedly like a fridge, heating or AC. I don’t think wifi can cause this. Try turning those off for an hour to see if it changes.
Sunny, thank you for the reply. I have pretty much eliminated all items you mentioned. Again I want to point out that my AIR module is located over 20 feet away from my home, and the next closest structure is about a third of an acre away. There is no underground utility near, and as my home is all electric I have no piezo ignitors, or sources that would point to the issue. As of writing this note my system reports that it has detected 76 strikes in the last 3 hours and all at a distance of 6-9 miles.
I have had my system now for over a year and it has done this pretty much since day one. I just turned off the detector and ignored it, and from time to time would turn it on to see if it would work. It was not until yesterday that I started reading these notes and decided to start asking some questions.
As the system tells you, it is detecting several miles from you. The problem is maybe that far away. Someone using a bad motor in a factory, compressor… could be anything …
Except for triangulating it’s source, not much you can do, the detector in the Air can’t be fine tuned …
nah, that is highly unlikely. For it being several miles away it has to be super strong, like lightning strike strong. Nearby sources are the likely source of these false lightning reports.
