Vantage Vue rain detector frustration

[Meteosat]

Hi friends,
just to let you know I think I have hit the buffers with regards to my Davis Vantage Vue and it's rain-gauge module.

The original complete unit was bought in august 2012. (It is a UK model) It ceased to report rain after about six or so months if my memory serves me correctly. Anyway, the UK Davis team offered me a self repair by sending me a new transmitter kit. This worked for about another nine months, then it too failed to report rain. A further replacement kit was shipped to me and this has also now failed.

No battery problem, and obviously I have done all the checks regarding the functioning of the tipping bucket. If I remove the bucket and then replace I get a couple of mm recorded, but then nothing more. I am not sure if it is a reed switch sticking or the magnet slowly losing a tiny part of it's magnetism, or a transmitter failure. But I don't intend to go back to the poor man who has had to deal with the issue. As all the other sensors are registering correctly I am wondering if there is a separate rain gauge unit I could integrate into Cumulus, alongside the Vantage Vue data?

I am also wondering if there are any more reliable units out there?

Cheers

James

[steve]

Cumulus supports the Hydreon RG-11 sensor. It's not really intended as a 'gauge' as such, but can function in that way if a high degree of accuracy is not too important. See http://www.weatherstations.co.uk/hydreon.htm for more details.

[Meteosat]

Cumulus supports the Hydreon RG-11 sensor. It's not really intended as a 'gauge' as such, but can function in that way if a high degree of accuracy is not too important. See http://www.weatherstations.co.uk/hydreon.htm for more details.

Thanks for that Steve.
I guess I would need to somehow connect the output to the current reed switch, and am not sure what power it might need or draw. Otherwise I am still open to other suggestion

[uncle_bob]

I haven't seen the insides of those Vue's but usually the mechanism for measuring rainfall is pretty simple.

You say that if you manually tip the bucket it does read ok? So that means the transmitter and reed switch seems to be working.
Maybe it needs a clean? There could be some gunk freezing up the fulcrum or weighting the tip bucket to one side. I'd be tempted to give it a blast of compressed air or circuit board cleaner (just make sure what you use isn't a plastic eating solvent).

Best of luck with it.

[Meteosat]

I haven't seen the insides of those Vue's but usually the mechanism for measuring rainfall is pretty simple.

You say that if you manually tip the bucket it does read ok? So that means the transmitter and reed switch seems to be working.
Maybe it needs a clean? There could be some gunk freezing up the fulcrum or weighting the tip bucket to one side. I'd be tempted to give it a blast of compressed air or circuit board cleaner (just make sure what you use isn't a plastic eating solvent).

Best of luck with it.

Thanks,
the tech guy in the UK office indicated the last two times would be due to a transmitter failure, but that doesn't easily correlate to the fact of a removal/insertion cycle causes a fresh reading.

It is a bot of a potch dismantling the unit each time, though I have it down to a half hour now through experience!

When we get a break in the weather I will do that.

Cheers

[steve]

I guess I would need to somehow connect the output to the current reed switch, and am not sure what power it might need or draw.

I suppose you could work out a way to do that, but it's really intended as a stand-alone sensor.