Lately I have been getting many daily false lightning reading. I know that near by electrical motors and such can cause them. My issue is that nothing has changed in my system. It has worked perfect for many years now. Seems this issue started in the last 30 days or so. Did something change on the firmware?
Site 4826
I see these intermittently, and more so in warmer weather
It has gotten cold here and this started when it was getting colder. Getting like 400 strikes a month when there is no bad weather. Scroll through the graph adn I am getting more now than when we have summer thunderstorms. https://tempestwx.com/station/4826/graph/13503/lightning/5
Lightning is not a local thing only, remember the little Franklin sensor hears about 40 miles around you and a heavy ‘spark’ 10 miles away could trigger it. Winter and summer are nice periods where so many heathers/coolers start running way more than in spring or autumn … those are often nice candidates to trigger false positives. Maybe a neighbour bought a new device (cheap thing mostly) that is far from ‘clean’ and triggers (leds, fluo lamps, a pump …). Not so easy to filter all out without becoming completely deaf … if you have a little am radio, tune it to a free frequency and walk around the house already and listen for potential disturbers (transfo, led etc)… maybe you can already find a local source
Had my new Tempest up for about a week now and it just started reporting a few false positives. Might have installed it too close to the power lines but I figured I would’ve received the false positives sooner…
some reply from above is still valid for you. Maybe something changed or was activated near you triggering the detection.
Thanks! Yep something must’ve triggered it. I thought WF verification system would’ve kept it from being reported. On my sensor status page, it does say “Lightning Disturber.”
Not to hijack your thread, but I just installed a replacement sensor that was provided to me due to my original being flagged with poor battery/charging performance (separate topic but my battery response already seems immensely better… yay!) and the new unit is experiencing false lightning readings (a wealth of them happened overnight last night). I will continue to monitor (mostly because I’m curious if this is an overnight pattern) but:
Will the QA, CL features eventually mark and remove these erroneous measurements? or are there any other mitigation techniques I can try? I hate to turn off the lightning alert because its actually quite useful in the region since lightning is so rare…
I’m dealing with a couple of false strikes report myself but I think the CL will make adjustments to your sensor to keep that from happening very often.
