I did it, ordered a PWS... question about wind...?

Ditto @johnny2678! Please post your experience here! I appreciate your write up, as I’m toying with doing my own PWS (my closest one is almost 6 miles from my house). The landscaper who recommended Rachio to me has his own weather station, but it cost him over $1K. But a $250 solution sounds doable! I’m looking forward to what you have to say.

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That’s great. Sounds like you have hit on a winning package for this audience. One of my concerns is the range on the 915 Mhz transmitter – in my situation, the signal will have to travel underground part of the way and the website says it doesn’t travel through earth. Would really like to hear your experience on making the wireless connection work to the Observer IP module. Good luck!

Thanks. They claim Observer IP has 300 ft line of sight and closer to 150 ft if you have a bunch of obstructions. For me the distance from my planned mount point to my router room is 82 ft with 36 ft of that being my wood/drywall construction home so I should be good. Since the meteobridge is a wifi point itself once you have competed setup (during which you have to be wired to your router) you can place your observerIP box connected by wire to your meteobridge in an area of your home closest to your PWS and then have the meteobridge wirelessly connect to your router in another room. So in theory I could reduce my 82 ft to around 46 ft if I need to.

This is all theory for now but I get everything this Sunday and plan to have it up in the first half of the week so stay tuned.

PS: measuring distances on google maps is easy. Zoom in and right click and choose measurement then click two points on the map and it instantly gives you the distance between them.

My question regarding a PWS is, how quickly would someone make their money back on purchasing a PWS along with a Iro? This is probably hard to estimate but would be interesting to know.

This is why it’s tricky… the shrubbery lining the road south of the house is 20+ feet high. The magnolia at the north east corner by the street is 15+ feet. The roof at it’s highest point is 26ft. I don’t think there’s any grass on the property that I can put it that meets the 4x rule unless I put it at the top of a flagpole… :slight_smile:

Still, happy to hear suggestions.

what did u end up ordering? do you have links?

well tomorrow is the big day… the PWS goes up… here is where I am…

I bought this PWS:

Ambient Weather WS-1400-IP Link: http://amzn.com/B00O9YIEJW

This all in one weather station is unique compared to competitors because it is the only one in its price range that includes solar and UV sensors which are used by Rachio to help calculate more accurate evaporation rates. Of course it also includes the standard wind, rain, temp, humidity, and pressure sensors. By itself it will transmit to a small included box called the Observer-IP that will send your data to Weather Underground (AND ONLY WEATHER UNDERGROUND, at least out of the box… stay with me…) or you can optionally later add a console for your home with an LCD screen. For me I plan on viewing the data on my computer, iPhone, and iPad using a variety of apps.

I then purchased a small personal router:

TP-LINK TL-MR3020 http://amzn.com/B00634PLTW

This small router will then be flashed with software from Meteobridge: http://www.meteobridge.com/wiki/index.php/Home that turns it into what is called a “meteobridge”. The software is free to try for 14 days but then requires a payment of $70. You then plug the small Observer-IP box that came with the weather station into this meteobridge and the meteobridge will then update not only Weather Underground with the data but basically every other major weather site of your choice including the PWSweather.com site that Rachio uses to display weather stations. It will also update a personal website if you have one. It does all this WITHOUT REQUIRING a computer to be on. This basically means I can leave the Observer-IP box, meteobox, and my home’s wi-fi router router running and I get 365 24/7 updates of weather data even if all my personal computers are off.


Tonight I dug a 28 inch deep, 6 inch wide hole using a post hole digger and tomorrow morning I will purchase a galvanized chain link top rail that comes in a 10.5 ft size, but I will cut 18 inches off the bottom: http://www.homedepot.com/p/YARDGARD-1-3-8-in-x-10-ft-6-in-17-Gauge-Galvanized-Top-Rail-328913DPT/100322532

This rail will go into the hole with Quikrete leaving about 7 ft. above ground which will plug directly into a 5 inch metal pipe that comes with the weather station (connected to the bottom). So essentially the bottom of my weather station will sit about 7.5 ft above ground level and the top about 8.5 ft above ground level.

By tomorrow night I hope to have everything running and within a few days I hope it appears on all the sites that Rachio sees. I’ll try to post some pictures and what I learned when its done.

Total cost of the project will be about $300 including everything.

Thanks!

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Did I miss it…Where’s the question about wind? BTW I just bought a Ambient Weather WS-1400-IP, I’m going to install it on top of my patio cover on the corner…basically over the lawn.

Back to the missing wind question…does the gen2 unit have the capability to NOT water if the wind is above a certain speed?

Boy do I feel like an idiot…When I clicked on this post I thought I was looking at the whole thread…Guess I was only looking at the last two posts. sorry about that.

well it’s up! couldn’t have gone more smoothly. bought the 10.5 ft pole I mentioned, had home depot cut it for me to be 9 ft 3 in. put some gravel in the bottom of the hole i dug yesterday, put the pole in and got it plum then poured in 1 1/4 bags of quikrete fast set mix and added about a gallon of water on top. Four hours later it had set-up quite a bit and I mounted the WS-1400-IP on top and the included extension slide perfectly over the long pole I had set in the ground. after setting it due south i drilled a hole all the way through the joint and put a stainless steel screw all the way through with a lock nut on the end. i have only setup the weather station with Weather Underground so far but tomorrow I’ll setup the meteobox and get registered to have PWSWeather.com also get the data so in a few days it will appear on the Rachio app and I can start using my own data for my Iro.

So far all the data is dead on compared to surrounding weather stations except mine is one of the only with solar and UV data! Tonight I should get a bit of rain so I am hoping the rain gauge appears accurate.

Here it is… I’ll post a new thread with pics and more details once 100% of everything, including the Rachio integration is complete…

https://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=KILPLAIN41

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You’ve pretty much sold me on getting one. Thank you for the great posts!

The only thing I’m going to initially try differently is using the shell script that’s floating around on a thread here to try and pull the WU data and post it over on PWSWeather. I already have a RaspberryPi running 24/7 already so if that turns out to be reliable, I’ll skip the Meteobridge gizmo.

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great job @boldblue737! More excited than ever to get mine up and running. There are too many microclimate variations here in FL to rely on any of the surrounding stations. Just have to figure out placement…

Perhaps THIS.

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@boldblue737 Going to do the same thing, will let you know how it goes!

I promised that big post and I’ll finally do it this weekend. My setup is working flawlessly now but I did have a bizarre issue crop up. With my router sometimes the Observer-IP box would start serving up corrupt html webpages of its data. Long story short the observer-ip directly sends its data to weather underground (flawless) and shows you a direct HTML webpage (like a router configuration page) but it was this html page that sometimes would get messed up every few days. The meteobridge reads that html page and sometimes the corruption would cause it to send wildly wrong numbers to CWOP would obviously killed me in regards to accuracy for Rachio. I tried everything working with the meteobridge developer for weeks but I am seemingly the only person with this issue which I think relates somehow to my apple router. I finally gave up and paid $130 to get a “meteostick” which plugs directly into the meteobridge and gathers the data from the weather station directly over the air. No middle man. It works perfectly now but obviously added to the cost but I’m super happy now. The accuracy of my station on CWOP is now dead on and the Rachio is using the data perfectly. I’ll make a post about everything and with pics this weekend.

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@boldblue737 Great to hear! Just placed the order for above, weather station coming sometime next week. I’ll post pictures as I install and chronicle the experience. Excited to contribute to the personal weather station networks. We’ve had so many issues with Apple routers, glad I don’t own one of those :wink:

:cheers:

I installed this exact setup at my house just last week! I used the Ambient 1400 and the TP Link for the meteobridge. The only thing I was trying to figure out is that when I look at the weather data from my PWS on PWSweather I am not seeing the solar and UV data. Have any of you found this data on PWS? I see it on weather underground.

Here is a picture of mine on the old TV antenna.

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PWSWeather is recording solar data behind the scenes but does not yet display it on their site. Further Rachio does not get solar data from PWSWeather at this time because they don’t display it. PWSweather claim to be working on it.

The only way I know of to get solar data to Rachio at this time is via CWOP. It takes a bit of effort to sign up for CWOP (not much but there is back and forth with the administrators of CWOP for 3-7 days until you are good to go) but then the meteobridge will send data to CWOP and Rachio can be set to use the CWOP station.

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I have just started looking into the CWOP. So far it looks pretty confusing. I will give it a go and see if I can get set up on there. This is too much fun playing with this IRO and PWS combination. Who knew watering your yard could be so much fun?!?!?!

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I got my PWS transmitting to CWOP. If I understand correctly, I will get an email from them or something before the station becomes “registered”. I did send them the email stating that I had verified my location. How long did it take for you guys to get your email/registration notice? I saw the 3-7 days but I would have thought that I would have gotten an email by now. It has been over 48 hours since I sent the email.

I think they do it like once a week in a batch. You will get an email back (I believe I got mine on a Monday) and it listed me and all the others who applied since the last batch email as being accepted. The email they send you will then say when your site will appear live and that was like another 48 hours but then it will just suddenly appear in Rachio.

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