Low-Budget Home Weather Stations?

Toby Truman asks: "Working at the Fenwick Island Weather Station, I already have access to million-dollar meteorology equipment. However, some tinkerlusting college friends have been asking me about home weather stations, a subject I don't have a lot of experience with. Have any Slashdot users experimented with DIY weather stations, and if so, what do they recommend?"

Davis Instruments

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Several years ago I picked up a Davis Instruments [davisnet.com] Weather Monitor II [davisnet.com]. Back then, there were only a couple of home weather stations on the market. The cost was about $500 with various sensors.

Eight years later, it's done ok... the biggest problem is the wind sensor gets hit by lightning and it frys the station. The last time this happened, two years ago, I put off repairing it ($75) until I remount and properly ground the anemoneter (wind sensor). This will be one of my summer projects.

The humidity sensor dies every now and then, but Davis almost always replaces it for free. The biggest problem with that is where I mounted it; too high for regular access - I have to borrow a ladder.

I've pulled Cat5e to the attic and I'm about ready to deploy a "weather cam" pointed northeast out of an attic window so I can display realtime images. As the weather station comes back online, there are a number of windoze products out there that will log and create HTML pages with the data coming out of the WMII.

The WMII has been a fun little toy...

An underlying theme is the mounting of the sensors. Every location will be different, but can be a pain. The newer wireless sensors are very appealing, since you could mount them away from a house and not face some of the height/access problems you encounter on a roof top.

If I were to start over, I'd look at the now much richer market place like this:

• Available/tools/programs for logging, saving and making web pages for a station;
• Wireless support;
• Varity of sensors for the station;
• Warrenties given even the sensors get beat up and have to repaired/replaced;
• I'd favor products that have open, published data standards; Davis doesn't that I know of. Apparently third party products have reversed engineered the data stream.

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You expect weather forecasts to be right?