Cumulus Support

I recently purchased my first weather station, a N96GY from Maplins and have managed to set it up ok together with Cumulus software. All pretty easy to follow, and now online at http://www.finghall.com/weather
I have having a good read on here, so I dont ask too many silly questions!

One thing I can confirm - the usb lead that comes with the kit is rubbish - I kept getting "lost sensor connection" until I replaced it with a decent screened one. I wonder how many units Maplins have replaced when all that was wrong was an unscreened usb lead!

Outside temp results seem a bit high when the sun is shining - I guess this is due to the inadequate "solar screen". Would painting it silver be any help?

Also as the N96GY has no Solar Radiation sender, can I replace that portion of the html on the various pages with a webtag for manual entry of snow depth <#snowdepth> ? Not really up on html, so I am a bit unsure how I would do this.

Sorry this is rather a rambling first post!

Hi and welcome to the forum,

painting the radiation shield silver will make it worse, white is best; I made an extra shield of the upturned saucer type, which helped but I didn’t completely get rid of the problem until I located the sensor in the shade.

This is what I did for the snow depth; open indexT.htm in notepad and delete this code:
<!-- Solar data. If you don't have a solar sensor, you may wish to delete everything from here to the next comment -->
<tr class="td_temperature_data">
<td>Solar Radiation</td>
<td><#SolarRad>&nbsp;W/m&sup2;</td>
<td>Evapotranspiration Today</td>
<td><#ET>&nbsp;<#rainunit></td>
</tr>
<!-- End of solar data -->

and then change this:

<tr class="td_rainfall_data">
<td>Rainfall&nbsp;Today</td>
<td><#rfall>&nbsp;<#rainunit></td>
<td>Rainfall&nbsp;Rate</td>
<td><#rrate>&nbsp;<#rainunit>/hr</td>
</tr>

To this:

<tr class="td_rainfall_data">
<td>Rainfall&nbsp;Today</td>
<td><#rfall>&nbsp;<#rainunit>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Snow&nbsp;Depth&nbsp;<#snowdepth>&nbsp;cm</td>
<td>Rainfall&nbsp;Rate</td>
<td><#rrate>&nbsp;<#rainunit>/hr</td>
</tr>

When there is no chance of any snow I comment out the snow depth by putting this <!-- and this -->
before and after the code we added, like this:

<tr class="td_rainfall_data">
<td>Rainfall&nbsp;Today</td>
<td><#rfall>&nbsp;<#rainunit><!-- &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Snow&nbsp;Depth&nbsp;<#snowdepth>&nbsp;cm --></td>
<td>Rainfall&nbsp;Rate</td>
<td><#rrate>&nbsp;<#rainunit>/hr</td>

To make life a little easier you could download notepad++ to edit this html.
If you need to adjust the spaces between words, each one of these: &nbsp; is a space,
have a play you will soon get the hang of it.

Welcome to the forum, well done with your website. Sunlight can be a trouble with the readings, I got mine right when moved it to more shade and now it works fine.

Many thanks for all the advice. The shield is just the grey plastic, so I will try spraying it brilliant white and experiment with relocating it. I will have a play with that html, many thanks for the code.