Home weather stations - what's the weather like where you are?
I've been idly browsing for a home weather station for a while, hoping to contribute to the local sensor network for a region that's got lots of microclimate variation. I saw this one from Seeed Studio today, and was hoping for some reviews and advice. Seeed Studio devices are known for open source software, and I wouldn't mind playing with writing a tie-in for sprinkler system automation so we're not irrigating when it's about to rain. It wouldn't be situated so far from the house that we'd need to use the LoRaWAN feature, though.
Concurrently, we just had an inch of rain dropped on our house in the space of 15 minutes, with winds that were taking down tree branches. The weather report says "light rain", weather stations a mile away continue to indicate that everything is bone dry with quiet air. This rainstorm breaks a nearly month-long drought. I'm finding it nerve-wracking that climate change makes it impossible to use past local weather as a predictor of what to expect for gardening, home maintenance, and outdoor activities, and local weather reports are so inaccurate. So that's (hopefully) where the weather station might come into play.
That being said, any chat about your local conditions and reporting from your station is welcome.
We got a mean heatwave going on in Texas. Just today we had a momentary power outage in my neighborhood.
Power goes out if it gets too hot or too cold in Texas?
When the heatwave outages hit bigger cities, you'll hear it in the news I'm sure. I'm not an expert on electricity, but I'm sure that overloading old circuits or overheating a device that was not intended to work under such temperatures will cause said devices to power down.
I do think Texas is better equipped for the heat than flash freezes. To a point. We'll see. It's not unusual for summer heat to get up to 110°F in some parts of Texas, but if you told me it was getting up to that much in San Antonio I'd do a double take.
It's been unusually warm this month in Belgium, I would say summer is a month early compared to the previous years (that were way warmer than in my youth).
Very dry too, which is not what we expect in summer.
My home weather station is an older model I've been using for 15 years now : the WH1080 built by Fine Offset. At the time I got in touch with them and got the datasheet and memory map. So I'm attached to that model as it's my only foray in connecting directly to a USB device with my own software (at the time, running on my linux TV box then my NAS). Now it's running a modded version of this projet on a Raspberry Pi, that feeds its raw data as a single string to Node Red.
Node Red integrates it in my home automation, and sends it to Weather Underground. It's also available as a public web page that the local astronomy guys use as I've included the SQM-LE measurements as well (it measures the darkness off the sky).
Regarding the hardware, I think most of the sensors are quite good overall, but a proper installation is more difficult for a hobbyist. It's not easy to have a 10 meter mast for wind measurement, have the temperature and humidity sensor far from trees, buildings, roads, etc...
Weather underground has a nice guide
Thank you! We've got some difficulties with wind shadow from nearby very tall (20+ meter) trees, so I don't know that we'll be able to get the degree of accuracy Weather Underground is seeking. The easiest and most neighbor-friendly mounting with decent temperature/rain/wind gauge accuracy would be a 2 meter post attached to the railing on the corner of a 2nd floor elevated deck. That's the point on the property farthest from any trees, at a decent elevation from the ground.
We have the opposite here in Northern California. We had a week of summer then it dropped back into the mid-70s to 80F. I haven't needed to run my A/C in weeks.
I was gifted a 5-n-1 Acruite weather station (temp, humidity, rain, wind speed, wind direction). It's been running for a little over a year and is still chugging along. The interesting thing about these Acurite units is that they emit information over 433Mhz. This prompted me to install some bunny ears with an SDR dongle in the garage and now that data is locally stored in Home Assistant for long-term statistics. I also get to see other things in the neighborhood that emit on the same spectrum. It's been quite interesting.
I live in Texas and the its been brutal the last week (103.5F was the highest temp recorded last week), with a worse outlook this week.
I'm not familiar with Acruite, but I was trying to DIY myself a cheaper home weather station using $2 sensors wired to 433MHz chips, and so I've been doing some light research into how professional units work. Does Acruite use some standard protocol in their messaging that the SDR dongle can decode by default? And how often does your unit transmit?
I'm using rtl_433 which has a bunch of supported device protocols that it will just automatically pick up and send to MQTT. It's pretty low utilization as well. I run it off of an old Pi Zero W connected to an official RTL-SDR dongle.
It transmits at 30-second intervals, switching between two different message formats. Here's an example of what is sent to MQTT:
I bought the Sainlogic weather station in January 2022 and I love it. The only real downside (IMO) to it is that you can't add a bunch of neat optional sensors (like soil moisture or lightning strike), but I really like having the display for it.
The weather this year has been... annoying. Temperature was all over the place, this spring, with an unseasonably warm week in early spring, followed by a foot of snow. Normally, our springs are really quite wet but we had a solid six weeks in April-May with only 1mm of rain, so the flowers haven't been very happy this year.
Very bad thunderstorms and unseasonably cool where I live in the southeast, but it looks like the heat is finally here this week with a high of 97 on Friday. Thankfully I got the AC in my car fixed a couple weeks ago.
Central Europe. Today it's 30°C. In a couple of hours there's supposed to be a thunderstorm. And boy, do I hope for it.
For my anything past 24°C is unbearable to function. And looking at current trends of rising temperature, I know I am fucked.