05 August 2007

Weather watching

weather stationToday's fairly substantial job was to put up our weather station. As we're planning to generate our own energy from the wind and the sun, it is going to be useful to have some record of the amount of both that we can expect here. Mike decided that we should put the anemometer as high up as possible, so we had a 30 foot pole to put up. We started by digging a big hole at the back of the small barn, then attached the anemometer to the top of the pole and the weather station a bit further down. The pole was very heavy, but Mike managed to get it into place and then attached it to the edge of the barn roof with two brackets. We concreted the base of the pole into its hole and the entire edifice seems pretty sturdy now.

Weather station displayThe weather station transmits information to a data logger which is attached to my PC and downloads every 15 minutes. It's really neat - measuring sunlight, wind speed and direction, amount of rainfall (I wish!), temperature, humidity, UV, well, you name it really. You can get various views and reports of the data, with the ability to upload it to a website. The main weather display is a bit lurid (and looks like it hasn't been updated since about 1995) but it gives you a useful summary of the current conditions.

P.S. Finally got the upload sorted out - you can see the weather we're having at the Weather Underground site.

P.P.S. And now there's a weather station sticker on the blog too. I love this stuff - such a geek!

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