Weather Station

One thing I've been wanting for a while is a weather station. For a long time they were really out of our budget, but by the time we were ready to do it, they'd dropped in price substantially so there you go.

We chose the AcuRite 01540M from Weathershack.com. If you are considering this and wondering about the options, I added lithium batteries and a thirty foot extension for the battery pack (we really only needed six feet, but no fine tuning was available). We have our entire property covered in a wifi mesh and there was line of sight to there I was putting the display inside, so I didn't add any repeaters, and we have plenty of compasses so I didn't get any of those.

The station arrived pretty quickly. We decided to put it up on the fence around the chicken yard.

Installation was fairly straightforward, though not mindlessly easy. The station gets aligned towards the south (hence the need for a compass), then tightened into place.

The most "complicated" part of the setup was calibrating the rain gauge. I had to find a plastic cup, make a tiny hole in the bottom, and put a specific amount of water in it to slowly drip into the gauge.

It took about half an hour with me standing up there holding the cup and gently encouraging water to drip out of it not too quickly but also not too slowly. The gauge was properly calibrated, so I didn't need to do any adjustments.

The chickens seemed unconcerned with the shenanigans.

We installed the weather station in November, and it's done a great job of keeping track of our very local weather. It's been very useful for keeping track of rainfall, which we track both for sump reasons and also because we had to stop all the yard digging projects because the soil got too dry. So it looks like over Christmas we can go out and dig some more, oh joy.

posted by ayse on 12/22/20