[Weather] Another station for sale

[Steinar Midtskogen]

[Ray Dzek]

> I punted my 1-wire system back in about March of this year.  I got tired 
> of instruments failing.  The barometer and humidity where always 
> throwing tantrums.  It was always $30 here and $50 there to either 
> rebuild or order new kits to replace stuff.  Finally the wind speed 
> stopped working too.  That was the last straw.

Failing humidity sensors have really frustrated me as well.  Besides
that, in three years I've only (touch wood, etc) seen one lightning
sensor fail, a spider invasion in a rain gauge and a solar sensor that
got its dome destroyed by hail.  I've had to rewire a couple of times
to fix wet connections, though, before I got something which I believe
is very stable.  I have 3 humidity sensors, 11 temperature, 2 rain
gauges, 1 solar, 1 lightning, 1 wind, 1 pressure and 1 snow depth.
I've been logging to a CF card on an NSLU2 for a year and a half, and
it's never failed (whereas the PC used before had at least one hd
crash).

One important reason why I like 1-wire is that I can afford to have
spare parts available and it's easy to fix anything if something
breaks.  I know someone who has a Davis station which recently broke
down.  He had to return the board for repair and was unable to log for
weeks.  So far, I've never lost data for longer than 10 hours or so,
because if something broke in the evening and I didn't notice before
the next morning, I've always been able to fix it quickly.

But I totally agree that 1-wire requires a bit of maintenance.  As a
hobby, that's fine as long as I don't run more than a few stations.
If I were to run dozens of outdoor stations (and had not to pay for
them), I would probably insist on something other than 1-wire if
possible.

-- 
Steinar