Gardening

Urban Homesteading: Weather Stations

It started innocently….Kirk for years had pined for a “real” weather station and finally I said “Oh just get it!” Little did I know it would end up making another weather nerd, which was me. Not long after this was put up on our fence post, our neighbors were asking what it was. Of which they thought it was neat (we have great neighbors!)

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The first, yes, the first (it gets addicting) was a Ambient Weather WS-1200-IP OBSERVER Solar Powered system:

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We mounted it on a pole. After figuring out the setup, we set it up on Weather Underground, and were the proud Daddy and Mommy to our first public weather station.

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A few months back, AcuRite sent us a weather station system to try out. We mounted it nearby the Ambient, but did a low mount for this one.

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The kids, doing their work.

And this is why it is addicting: You can pinpoint the bad and nice weather, almost to the minute. If I want to go walking, I look it up on my phone (Weather Underground has an app), and watch for rain moving in. I can see when the hottest time of the day is. I can see the flow of weeks past, see how much rain has fallen, see how strong the wind was here. Not 10 miles away.

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Wether or not you put your station on to public (our second one isn’t yet, but will become eventually), having the ability to go back and see helps so much with figuring out how much water to store for summer gardening, what the averages are and so on. It was scary and eye-opening to see in December we got over 9″ of rain!

The only issue we have had is if you notice it isn’t measuring rain suddenly, you will need to open it up and clean it out. We followed YouTube videos and they were right: spiders like to hang out inside the system and can block it. Not horrid, just small garden ones. Still made Kirk do it though 😉 Can’t blame them for wanting dry shelter though!

It’s been a fun project, and has helped us predict so much, especially with when to water and not. If you are looking to learn more about the local weather, a station is a good investment.

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