Didsbury Alberta Unoffical Weather Station

Due to a power supply recall, the outdoor air quality sensor will be offline until a replacement arrives.

Replacement anemometer cups arrived today. Since I had to order new parts, I took advantage and ordered a new 24-Hour Fan for the temperature sensor and batteries and the new Aerocone rain collector with anti bird sitting spikes. Got everything installed today. Some pictures of the upgrades.

New anemometer cups installed and spinning.

Old rain collector

New Aerocone rain collector

New 24-hour fan and batteries.  The bearings on the old one was really worn out.  The fan hasn’t worked properly for the last year and a bit.  This should hopefully give me better temperature readings when there isn’t any wind and when the sun is beating down on the unit.

Also made some coding updates to the main front page.  Added some new features and updates.

Happy weather watching!

Today’s storm caused damage to the anemometer.  The system recorded 116km/hr winds with hail. New part is on order.

The new PurpleAir air quality sensor has been live since December.  The sensor has been working very well so far.

check it out here:

Click on the number circle on the map of Didsbury to bring up the data from my sensor. Ignore the legend table on the left side.

The air quality has been very good for the most part but have seen some spikes.  So far the poor air quality days have been due to wood stove smoke or local farm burning cut brushes.  Seen a few days when the southeast winds are blowing that the air quality becomes poor.  Not sure what pollutant is causing this spike.

If heading outside to exercise, it is worth while to check the air quality and then plan according.

Air quality is something we offen take for granted in Canada but our world is becoming more and more polluted. To help monitor air quality I’m added a air quality monitor to my weather station. I live in a valley on the prairies which often has air settling in and getting locked in as winds blow over and trap the air. So I’m curious what the air quality is like. What here for more details. Check out the crowd sourced project at https://www.purpleair.com
Talking about air quality, indoor air quality is also something to be concerned about. Radeon gases trapped in houses is a something that needs more attention. At my place in Didsbury I’ve seen numbers as high of 385Bq/m3 in my living area, basement would be even higher. World Health Organization recommends that levels should be max 100Bq/m3. Canada Health Organization max is 200Bq/m3. Air quality is something we need to look at more to improve the health of our communities.

At about 22:00 July 1,2016 the anemometer was struck by a dime to quarter sized hail (estimate) that broke on of the wind cups right off the unit. Luckily it landed in the yard and I was able to glue it back on. Wind reading are back as of 15:45 July 2, 2016.

So you may have noticed that today’s weather was reporting a much more pleasant temperature of +21 celcius.  Was a nice day, as long as you stayed indoors.

The weather station was having transmission errors and were causing me grief as it was reporting “Low Battery on Station 1”, but a new battery was in and the station was reporting data packets were being received without error, but no outside temperature, outside humidity and rainfall data was being received.

After 8+ hours, the diagnostic screen showed lots of good packets and very few bad packets, but no data was recorded.

The view from WeatherLink Graph showed a lack of data recorded during this time.

I then proceed to verify that the solar panel was charging the super capacitor, which it was (This is what powers the sensor most of the time).  The CR123 backup battery was new (powers the sensor if the super capacitor runs out of power after a long night or cloudy day).  I then checked the main console’s backup battery and found that one of them had corroded, so I replaced the 3 C batteries.  The main console runs on AC power so the batteries are just for power outages.  My previous Oregon Scientific weather station would have transmission errors when the main console batteries were exhausted.  But even with new batteries in the Davis, the problem still existed.

So after some reading online, but still with no really solution, the last thing to try before calling Davis for support was change the transmission channels.  So I changed it to a new channel and things started working correctly again.  The interesting thing is the main console started reporting Channel 1 as possible data after the sensor was changed to the new channel. So I left the console to gather data from Channel 1, but no good or bad packets were received even through it thought something was there.  So the problem now appears to be frequency channel confusion and not a bad battery.  Time will tell.  So as of late this evening, I’ve put the station back outside. Once I’ve verified no more blank data, I’ll then re-enable uploading to Weather Underground.

I sure noticed that I missed the local data today!  Wasn’t sure what to wear outside on my walk.  The Weather Network data was so 1 hour ago and it had cooled off since that report.

Happy weather watching!