Rain sensor in the winter

Tempest Owners Feature Requests
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1

Would be nice to disable rain sensor if temperature was below freezing. The sensor reports snow and sleet as liquid precipitation and that is reported to weather underground and skews the archive data as well.

Would like to see the option to set a flyer that only reports rainfall if temp is above freezing or something along that line.

Another option would be for a separate WiFi tipping rain bucket for the station.

2

Out of curiosity, how much would you pay for a professional-grade tipping bucket???

3

I would pay around $75-150.

4

I think the question should also be asked, is it better to show no measurable precipitation of any type (shutting the sensor off) or having a somewhat skewed measurement in the interim?

As an example, during the last snow/sleet/ice event here in N.Y., my Sky showed a somewhat high reading relative to my 2 area airports for this same event. My Sky showed .69" vs .54" and 52" for the 2 area airports in fairly close proximity to me. Given that my Davis showed 0.00" precipitation (not heated) and no other area PWS indicated any precip either, I’m not unhappy with the results. This is the first event of this type since I’ve had my Sky and I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Was I lucky that my measured amount was as close as it was to the actual ‘official’ measurement? Who knows, it was the first even of this type since I had installed my Sky.

So at least IMO, I’d rather have somewhat of an overestimate than a ‘non-event’ reported by a non-heated tipping bucket system. The tipping bucket would have (and did) indicate that no precipitation event had occurred.

With that said I can certainly see others feeling differently.

2 Likes
5

You can buy a whole vantage vue sensor suite for $175 in numerous places. Of course you have to get the data ‘off’ that into a usable form, so it’s not quite that simple, but it’s doable.

6

Maybe, but it’s not so simple. First, you can actually have rain when your local air temperature is well below freezing. Also, the hardware actually reports “possible sleet/hail” when the signal looks more solid than liquid, but we do not present this in the apps yet because we need to collect and analyze a lot more data to make it useful. That’s one of the areas where your smart weather station will get smarter over time.

That’s a good idea too - and something we will consider in the future.

4 Likes