Saturday, November 16, 2013

Cool weather gadget

I found a home weather station at a local warehouse store - costco - for $80.  Setup was simple; install batteries, place the sensors where you want them, turn it on.  the internet connection took a little fiddling; but this was up and running 20 minutes after opening the box.
 It tracks rainfall, humidity, wind direction and speed, indoor and outdoor temperature and barometric pressure.   It keeps all of the information that it tracks, so you can look back to see when rain fell, for instance, or how much over a period of time.  In the picture below it's showing that we've had 1.24" of rain in the last 24 hours.
 We've actually had quite a bit of rain in the last few days; averaging 1" of rain daily; temperatures in the 40s or high 30s.   I think that the rainfall at this farm is higher than at the other farm; I'm in the foothills of the mountains, and the clouds shed water on their way over.  2" of rain over 24 hours is enough to raise the local river level 4'.
3" of rain in 3 days.  Time to dig out the seed catalogs!

The model I've got is closest to this one, but mine didn't come with the pc software interface.  It does however come with an internet connection, so I can see what the conditions are at the farm on my cell phone from anywhere.  that's very nice.

1 comment:

sailj32 said...

I have had a similar system from Honeywell for a few years and am quite disappointed. The rain sensor died after a year, not repairable. The temp and humidity sensors work OK but have nowhere near the advertised wireless range - only about 50 feet maximum. The user interface is poor, hard to use and hard to read the display.

I hope you are as impressed with the LaCrosse system after a year or two. I have decided that it is worth the extra money to get a better unit, probably from Davis Instruments.