Today, during an inundation from TS Isaias, I noticed again that my SKY is severely underreporting wind gusts. I suspect this is due to my unit being an early production model with no hydrophobic coating on the ultrasonic reflector plate. Obviously the plate was wet with today’s conditions.
Winds were constantly underreported during the event. I took a video of the outside conditions when the sensor was reporting 1-9 MPH gusts. Here’s a screen grab:
During field testing of different coatings, I coated one of my SKYs with a super nano-coating used on cars. @dsj said that it did reduce the number of rejected wind values but not as much as the superhydrophobic coating they went with did. I happened to use the coating from R1 Coatings but there are others on the market. Basically the hydrophobic coating allows the wind to blow the water off the plate more readily. I coated the whole unit, which made it easier to clean, too.
Next to the fact you could have had water on pate, when I see your picture I wonder in how far your SKY is really ‘open enough’ to catch gusts that can be measured on an open field.
Those wonderful trees to a perfect screening job and what you measure is really what is getting to your place. Going back in your history I see some peaks to near 30 mph but overal I have a feeling the readings are homogeneous.
And as said gizmoev, a coating can improve the water on plate problem (if it happens). If you can apply that, why not
Thanks for the coating recommendations. I might give this a try. Any experience with Never Wet?
Re: local obstructions, yes, that is indeed a factor. SKY is mounted below the treeline (I have 100’+ holly and oak trees nearby) and does not receive clean wind fetch in certain directions. However, the event earlier this week had prevailing winds in a direction that SKY had good clearance from. The video was taken during one of many 10+ second events with what I estimate were 30-40 MPH winds directly toward the SKY in an unobstructed direction. At that point I didn’t see any readings over 9MPH in the realtime app display, or on the wind chart.
