Installing our weather station
Here are a few snaps taken as we installed Weather Station Aercus Weathersleuth WH24 External Sensor Cluster. It really needed to be up as high as possible, yet reasonably easy to maintain. It also needed to be clear of obstructions. Well, as clear as our postage-stamp sized backyard will allow. The only viable place was the shed roof. So I mounted it on a third-party stainless steel mast bolted to an intermediate panel, which in turn is bolted to the shed roof joists with 2 off M6 x 100mm carriage bolts and Nylock® nuts. We’re surrounded by hedges and houses and this was really the only viable location.
By default the WH24 tries to talk to Weather Underground website – quite a lot of internet weather stations are preconfigured that way, apparently. However, I felt rather uncomfortable about this for a number of reasons that I won’t bore you with here. But it is not hard to make it feed a local server instead should you wish to do so. In our case, it’s a tiny Raspberry Pi 4 (c/w a cheapie 1TB Intel SSD and a clever piece of software called Weewx) that lives on a small shelf in my garage.
Of course, the “Weather Underground” option is simpler to set up and seems to be the way most people use these things, certainly in the first instance. Whereas the “local server” option was convenient for me mostly by virtue of the fact that I already had the Raspberry Pi set up and working – managing all our IP security cameras using Zoneminder. FWIW, we’re particularly enjoying the historical meteorological data that the “local server” method accrues too, but I realise this may not be everybody’s proverbial cup of tea.
The external sensor cluster is a weird-looking thing – I guess that’s how its designers managed to make it so remarkably compact. My wife thinks it looks like a “Shewee” lol.On the bright side, it is solar-powered – charging a set of three R6 (AA) NiMH batteries with its built in solar panel. This Means you don’t have to keep climbing ladders and changing its batteries every few weeks. The only regular maintenance I anticipate is to get up on the shed roof every few months and brush the bird shit out of its rain gauge.
Where can I buy one?
At time of writing, Aercus Instruments Weathersleuth WH24 is on special offer from Amazon, a bit over 100 quid. Package includes external and internal sensor clusters and the radio-LAN transponder (the thing with all the blue LED’s). Bloody good value IMHO.