Broken Weather Station
The Borth and Ynyslas Weather Station is currently experiencing a few problems. Sometime last week the humidity sensor stopped working properly. This had happened before so I contacted the UK distributors of the equipment and soon had a new one ready to install.
Sunday was the day for the installation of the new humidity sensor. It is a fairly easy job, but best done on a dry, still day so I replaced it and had hoped that would fix the problem… It didn’t, in fact it made things worse. Once the new sensor was attached, we still had no humidity readings, but we also lost wind speed readings and the temperature readings were plainly wrong… 60ºC+? I think not, more like minus 2!
I tried all sorts of things, replaced the battery took the new sensor off, cleaning and checked all connection and wiring, restarted the console, reset the Sensor Suit, but all to no avail. Of course, all of these incorrect readings had by now caused havoc with my data as maximum temperatures for the day, month, year and all time records had been updated to 60ºC or more and many other readings such as dew points, heat index, maximum December temps, warmest daily average temps etc etc had all been overwritten with false readings.
It took me a while to reset all of these readings and find out what the correct readings were and when they actually occurred, but I think I got there in the end by going through the historical data files for the last 2 years… I may however have to repeat this task when I get the station back up and running and reconnect it to the computer and the website. I still hadn’t got the weather station going though.
Whilst the weather station was down and my Dad was here I thought we should make of it and swap the computer than powers the station software and uploads to the web over to a newer (and hopefully faster and quieter one I had waiting for just that purpose). It seemed to go OK and after quite a bit of fiddling we had it up and running with the weather station software running and all of the data as it should be…
Monday morning dawned and my Dad had had a thought in bed… maybe all wouldn;t be quite so cheerful with the new computer as we thought… he was right and no amount of tinkering or even trying to reinstall everything from scratch would get the new machine running properly… SO, that one has gone back with my Dad for some therapy! I also started getting to the bottom of why the weather station isn’t working.. The new humidity sensor that I was sent looks exactly the same on the outside, but if I take it apart it is actually an updated version and is now digital rather than analogue. It would appear that plugging it into the Sensor Suite may have caused some damage. I’m still waiting to contact the suppliers to find out if this can be fixed and how to go about getting it done…. The weather station may be out of service for a few days, and realistically may not be up and running again until after Xmas… Fingers crossed it isn’t too bad though and can be fixed easily…. Sometimes I hate technology.
