Avaiable from Weathershop https://www.weathershop.co.uk/5-in-1-wifi-weather-station-accur8-5100
Hi to our regular watchers of the weather station
03 January 2025 The new weather station data is now sent to Weathercloud.net
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The new weather station it is a ACCUR8 DWS5100 5-in-1 Solar-Powered
WiFi Weather Station with Weather Alerts. Avaiable from Weathershop https://www.weathershop.co.uk/5-in-1-wifi-weather-station-accur8-5100 |
The Duracell
Industrial batteries
20 / 11 / 2021 SORRY weather station is now broken the Duracell batteries in the base station leaked and have corroded the circuit board – watch this space!!
On line 21/5/20 I have found out what was causing the transmitter to stop working - the Duracell industrial battery had started leaking and corroded the terminal See photo
Offline 1/4/2020 Weather station offline and I did not notice because I was busy with fencing, shearing and hedge trimming! - still do not know whats wrong with the weather station.
Offline 23/02/2018 Weather station offline batteries failed with the cold, I have changed the Tesco cheap battery for Duracell Industrial ones these are supposed to work down to -20c.
Offline 19/12/2017 Batteries changed working again! but not for long cold snap stopped batteries working on 6-1-2018 temp is down to -3.3
16 to 19-12-2017 Station not working I think due to the batteries being flat because of the cold weather
Before we moved to a smallholding weather was just something that happened - it never really got in the way! Now how different it is, the weather is so important to us. Hay making relies on 3 weeks of good dry weather. And we find that the MET Office weather which is taken from Chivenor on the North Devon Coast, doesn't seem to reflect our weather here, probably because we are in the shadow of Dartmoor. As a birthday present I was given a home weather station - a Smart weather WH2080. These are available from Amazon.co.uk.
The company who make them are based in China, as nearly all electrical equipment manufacturers these days - Fine Off Set Electronics (25-2-2018 their website is back!) specialize in Weather forecasting equipment.
The Weather stations remote sensor is plastic and looks fragile but when installed it is fine. In the photo the weather station is installed on top of a 3 meter post, I have read that it should be mounted at 10 meters to get the proper readings. The base station which connects to the computer looks really good, with a large and easily readable display.
Accuracy hmm! The rain gauge which seems to over report rain - Important I have not positioned the rain or temp sensors correctly, they should be very low to the ground, however if we put ours low down the sheep will try and chew them! and now the wind speed monitor, reported a gust of 100mph on the 5 May 2012 - I did not notice it! - if wind speeds were reaching anywhere near a 100mph there would be a lot of damage so I think there might be a problem with the sensor. And on 30 May 2012 I reported a speed and a gust of 132mph -no that really did not happen - I think it was the batteries failing in the remote sensor.
History
Back in 2016 -unfortunately the weather station has had a few problems over Christmas - such as the rain gauge not working and then reporting a wind gust of 132 mph! and now the pc keeps losing the USB connection to base station so I have taken down the live weather page as its completely in accurate. I will try and sort out the problems as soon as possible. There appear to be several problems one the rain gauge is not working correctly or sometimes at all, also the pc keeps losing the USB connection which means I have removed the batteries from the Smartweather station to get it to working again - I thought this was to do with the weather station but its also happening with my windows phone, again this happened after a windows update.
14 November 2014 I have just changed the batteries again because the remote sensor kept losing contact with the base station. batteries in remote transmitter changed 5/5/2017
The manual does miss out useful bits of information but considering that the weather station is made in China and therefore the manual is translated into English, I thought it was quiet readable, but it does leave useful bits out - such as setting the pressure settings to a local reference. There is software supplied which you can monitor the weather on a PC and you do need this to configure some of the settings on the weather station.
Another apology from 27 Feb 2013 to 1 Mar 2013 there has not been live weather data and the data time stamp in realtime.txt has been wrong. This all happened after a MS Windows update - I am sure its coincidence!
Today at 16:40 26-2-2012 contact was lost with the base station via the USB connection. And no amount of reinstalling the software and rebooting the PC made any difference! Under XP SP3 things are better - so far. I have now connected the Base station to another PC which is running Windows XP SP3 the old PC was running Windows 2000 SP4, seemed to run ok for 3 days and then the Base stations USB port stopped talking, until I rebooted the base station i.e. took the batteries out! Which means all the data disappearing. So far and it has been over a two weeks the connection between the base station and the sensors has only been lost very briefly. It appears that moving the base station one foot to left helped!
However at 03:00 hours (14/03/12), Windows update download a security patch which required an automatic reboot of the PC which hung while shutting down! This is why no live weather updates had been posted since 03:34 hours until 9:30 the next morning..
Update 8 July 2012 after searching of various forums it appears that the Smart weather WH2080 has a problem, that if you leave the USB cable plugged in continuously uploading data - hmm I thought that was what it was for! Then after a while the USB port locks up and the only way to get it to work is to take out the batteries from the base station which loses the unsaved data. - however the whole weather station was replaced without any question and the new one seems to be fine and just in time for the Winter gales!