Deth

The other day, my girlfriend thought that I was going to buy a weather station, but that was her Christmas gift idea for me. She also didn’t know which one to get me.

I wasn’t going to buy one yet, but I have been eyeing them up since we had our tree removed. I was thinking next spring. In an ideal world Davis would have been the way to go, but they’re so much more expensive, and we won’t have the ideal setup, so the premium isn’t worth it. The Weatherford Tempest looked interesting to me, but I get the impression that its rain sensor may not be quite ready for prime time. I did like the idea of no moving parts. The Ambient WS-5000 is what I settled on and have been eyeing up since COVID. The anemometer sensor has no moving parts, but the rain has the buckets, so it’s a known technology. The only reason I didn’t order it myself earlier is the fact that it wasn’t in stock at that time.

Even when I just had the sensor sitting on the patio table, it seemed to match up pretty closely with local weather stations on Wunderground. It even picked up wind there. I had to try it out, and that was the best we could do until the mounting pole came.

Friday we put it up on a pole mounted off the side of the shed, and it got somewhat higher winds as would be expected, but the winds quickly died down for the night. Yesterday the winds matched pretty closely with the local weather stations with both direction and speed. It wasn’t a windy day by any means, but there was a breeze in the afternoon. Today is another breezy day, and it’s been matching up fairly well with the other local weather stations, considering today’s north winds are sort of blocked by the houses. Today’s wind is definitely under performing so far compared to the forecast.

We did have some rain last night, so I was able to compare the rainfall measurements to the other local personal weather stations. Mine ended up showing within .01 inches of rain from the other PWS around Mount Joy, which, I think, is more than reasonable. There will be some variation even with the less convective rain we had last night than there would be with summer thunderstorms with very heavy rain here but a block away nothing. We had less than a tenth of an inch of rain, so it’s not a great comparison, but it’s what I have to work with for now. The mount looks level, but we don’t have a high enough ladder to see the level on the rain sensor. There is no tree cover anywhere near the rain sensor, so it’d be getting all the rain.

The house behind us has a weather station in their yard too. It’s probably less than 50 feet away from mine. That’s what gave my girlfriend the idea. She kept seeing it after they got their tree cut down, by the same guy that did ours. Before the tree was removed, I could only see the pole.

It would be fascinating to compare mine to theirs since they’re so close together. That one appears to be a Davis, so it’s a different brand that’s known to be good. I’ve not been able to find that one shared on Wunderground or other sites that I know of to look, assuming the location information would be correct. Maybe we’ll see each other outside sometime and be able to compare that way.

I do like the console and the fact that not only is it color, but it also has a dark mode. The screen is nice and bright and relatively easy for me to see and read given my poor vision. That was my one complaint about my old Davis. The screen wasn’t the best contrast on that, although the text was fairly large, it was still pretty hard for me to see. The backlight wasn’t that great on it, either.

A personal weather station is really something I’ve always wanted. I had an Oregon Scientific one way back that was never installed properly. The same with the Davis I had, which I never put the anemometer up properly.