whether projects

Tracking things, making things, and learning things are three of my favorite things to do.

We got a new weather station (available on Weather Underground) in December. Unlike our former weather station, all of the sensors in this station are in one neat package. We followed the directions and put it on a mast on the roof.

It’s an AcuRite, and we’ve had some minor difficulties with it. My biggest complaint is that, if you lose Internet, you can still read the weather data as it’s coming in, but there’s no caching at the sensor station, the ground station, or the transmission hub. Seems to me that they could have put some memory on either the base station or the transmission hub, but they didn’t. So any data collected while the  Internet  is out is gone forever. Another complaint is that the transmission station won’t work if its batteries are dead, even though it’s plugged into AC power.

So it’s not the most reliable station in the universe. It’s not as reliable as our old La Crosse weather station. It’s not even as reliable as me in rainboots going out to record the high/low and rainfall at midnight every night back in our pre-weather station days.

Before we got the station, I did wonder about the wisdom of having all the sensors under one roof. Your anenometer wants to be exposed to the wind. The rain gauge prefers to be protected from the wind but away from walls or trees that might keep the rain from getting in. The thermometer is meant to measure the air temperature and so shouldn’t be in the sun. I thought the manufacturer might have thought of this and somehow protected the sensor from the effects of direct sunlight.

On the mast on the roof, the sensor station gets several hours of direct sunlight per day.

I still have my old reliable high/low thermometer on my front porch, where it has done its duty for 32 years without a minute of downtime.

The two thermometers ran pretty close all winter. The roof thermometer might have run a degree or two colder at night and a couple degrees warmer during the day, but it was accurate enough.

It started getting wild in May when it started reporting temperatures in the high 80s when it was 72 on the porch. Then the hot weather arrived, and the roof sensor regularly reports temperatures over 100F when the porch thermometer is hanging out comfortably in the 80s and 90s.

So the thermometer is crazily uncool. While its interesting to look at it and think “Yep, another great day not to be a roofer,” there are several hours per day when it’s useless for telling us what the weather is outside. We’re back to sticking our arms out the door and/or going out to the front porch to read the old reliable thermometer.

At some point, I’ll probably get a separate temperature sensor and stick it on the porch.

In the meantime, the divergence between the roof sensor and the porch thermometer is interesting to me. It’s nowhere near constant, running 10-30F warmer than the porch thermometer during the sunny afternoon hours. We’re in the forest, and the trees shade the roof sensor at times during the afternoon. In breezy weather, it tracks the porch thermometer more closely. It can vary widely over a short period of time.

So I’m casually tracking the difference between the porch thermometer (true temperature) and the roof thermometer (the argument against putting temperature sensors on an unprotected mast on the roof).