Cumulus Support

I was initially very happy with this inexpensive weather station that seems to do it all. I spent the time and money to setup a sturdy pole in the backyard for mounting and got all the electronics setup including the stream to Weather Underground. Then, it rained. My 2090 showed 1.7" when we actually got 2.5" of rain. It was a heavy downpour overnight. I contacted Ambient Weather support who immediately responded to say this unit does not accurately measure rainfall during heavy downpour. Well, isn't that nice. I live in KY and half of our rains are heavy thunderstorms. It sure would have been nice to know this information BEFORE I bought the unit. Worthless. They have offered to allow me to return the unit. That's great and all but I am not happy that I have taken the time to set this thing up only to find out after the fact it is not accurate. The support person was very matter-of-fact in his comments (which I appreciate) but did not offer any kind of discount on a station that actually "works".

The tech sort of suggested a jerry-rig fix-up scenario to alleviate the inaccuracy of the small rain bucket.

http://www.localweather.net.nz/smf/stat ... et-wh1081/

I'm probably going to send this unit back but wanted to see if anyone out there knows of any good fixes. If not, can you suggest a reasonably priced station that will accurately measure, um, weather?

A search of the forum will give you some discussion on modification, example https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.p ... d&start=15

The Davis stations are excellent and durable, but you must remember that the datalogger needs to be purchased as well at an additional cost if you want to connect to a computer or send your data to the internet/website.

Paul

PaulMy wrote:A search of the forum will give you some discussion on modification, example https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.p ... d&start=15

The Davis stations are excellent and durable, but you must remember that the datalogger needs to be purchased as well at an additional cost if you want to connect to a computer or send your data to the internet/website.

Paul

Thanks for the link. I think this just further hardens my disappointment. I didn't expect 100% accuracy on the rain gauge but I had no idea my station would be that inaccurate. I'm not interested in modifying mine at this point. I'm just going to send it back and dig up my pole.

Hi Eric,

How far up the pole did you mount the rain sensor? The general recommendation for "accurate" rain detection is for the sensor to be mounted virtually at ground level (but this is unlikely to be responsible for all of your 30% under-read). See for example this recent thread.

The two major causes of under-reading at high rainfall rates are "spash out" (particularly with the Fine Offset design) and water "lost" whilst the "see-saw" buckets are actually tipping. Extending the walls of the "funnel" is really a very simple modification (and IMHO well worthwhile bearing in mind the very low cost of these FO stations) but you should NOT increase the collection area (as suggested in the links above) because that might increase the second cause of error mentioned above.

Although Fine Offset do show all their sensors mounted on the little pole (for a good "marketing" photo), they do fit moderately long cables (with connectors to permit further extension if necessary) so it is possible to install all the sensors in more "optimum" locations. There are many threads on this forum giving recommendations and typical installations, particularly in the Fine Offset section.

Of course if you spend more than 5 times as much on a Davis station then you should get better results, but I believe you need to spend even more than that to allow all the sensors to be located "optimally".

Cheers, Alan.