I have built a simple hyper-local weather station at our house. It has been a wee bit expensive as most of my projects end up being, but I’m fairly happy with the results.
Today was the first day that the weather station itself was properly exposed to the elements. Kind of critical for something intended to measure the weather conditions, but it was probably the hardest part of the whole process.
The Ecowitt components
I considered a few different brands and components, but settled on Ecowitt as the best ‘bang for the buck’ product line to build a complete weather station around. For starters I bought the console, the Ecowitt HP2560_C.
This can hook up to a wide range of sensors that should hopefully cover all my near term desires. Supported sensors include soil moisture, lightning detectors, water sensors e.g. for your basement, air quality sensors, and standard weather stations.
After some fiddling, I also added the 7 in 1 WS90 weather station to my kit. Apparently the less expensive temperature and humidity sensors aren’t good enough to constitute a weather station as far as Weather Underground is concerned. The weather station detects rainfall, wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity, solar intensity, and UV index.
I don’t consider the configuration “done” yet. I want to add a lightning detector and a power line to the WS90 to provide it with power for heating snow off its collection grid, and I might want a couple of soil sensors at some point. But the basics are all there.
Weather Underground
One of my main objectives was to get our little weather station on the Weather Underground aka Wunderground. The motivating factor here is fairly weak: I really just wanted to know that we were contributing to weather forecasting near Castlegar in some way.
Wunderground is a global weather community, now owned by The Weather Company, that provides hyper-local weather details based on the willingness of people to connect up their personal weather station (PWS) to Wunderground. The kit used can be fancy or simple: some people have very complex and sophisticated PWS configurations.
You can see my PWS on Wunderground here=> https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/ICASTL203
Getting the station wet
Our weather station has been under a roof on our deck for the last several weeks. But I finally got out to set up the bracket for it so it is now ‘out in the weather’. It is where it can be rained/snowed on and has nearly 360 degree exposure to the weather, which is as it should be.
I don’t have the bracket quite right just yet. The Ecowitt WS90 wants a 1″ external diameter pipe to attach to, and the bracket I bought is a bit too large: 1″ is its internal diameter. So I will be building an adapter later with some PVC pipe once I pick that up and figure out how best to situate it. In any case, the WS90’s base fits fairly firmly in the mounting pipe so it is good enough for the time being.
