Weather Station History and Blog
Introduction
This page is about the history of the weather station itself rather than the history of the weather.
The history of the weather can be found here.
In the beginning
This station started with a Oregon Scientific WMR928N station. I don't recall exactly when I bought this first weather station but it would have been some time around 2001. There was no suitable software at the time to produce the kind of website that you see here today, so I had to build my own as best as I could. Full details of that weather station, how it was configured etc can be found here.
Eventually as the station aged and parts were difficult and expensive to come by, I gave the station to my brother who, being an electronics expert, was able to repair most parts of it and in particular the parts that he needed. So it is still working well today though not online anywhere.
To replace it I bought the Oregon Scientific WMR200 weather station. This came with good software but I liked the full version so much that I bought the upgrade. Eventually I found I could get excellent templates to bolt into my site and what you see today is based on those templates. Details of the current set-up can be found here. This one was acquired around June/July 2008.
The Blog
- 10-21 Nov 2009 - The rain gauge stopped working for some unknown reason and went unnoticed for a while. This is unfortunate as it was the wettest November for 30 years and data between those dates was not acquired and so will be missing from my historical online database. I believe that it is possible to import this history from the Wunderground weather site but so far have been unable to find out how to do it. If you can help then please contact me and help me out. I suspect that the rain gauge was just a little too far away from the base station (even though it was well within its rated distance) and with cold weather affecting the batteries it was failing to communicate. Moving it closer to the base station did the trick. Since it is up on the roof, with all the effort of unpacking the ladders and getting up there, I naturally changed the batteries regardless of whether or not they needed changing but that didn't fix the problem - the move was necessary. I'm wondering if there is any way that the software designers could add functionality to get it to email me if a sensor drops out, in the same way that it emails me for extremes of weather or if it starts raining.
- 06 Feb 2010 - UV Sensor added to the weather station. The graphs have no space for another axis (according to the software set-up) so I have elected to no longer graph indoor humidity and instead graph the outdoor UV and sunlight hours per day. It was very hard to find someone in the UK that could supply the UV sensor. It is readily available in the USA but the suppliers there will not ship to the UK. Eventually I found it at Outdoor GB but even they took a very long time to replenish stock and deliver it. Happily it's here and up and running now.