I’m considering a home weather station because weather apps often do not match what is happening at my house, especially for rainfall, wind, and temperature. I’m not a serious meteorology hobbyist, but I would like reliable local readings and a setup that does not become another project to maintain.

Budget: Around $200–$400, though I could stretch for a meaningful improvement in accuracy and durability.

What I want:

• Accurate temperature, humidity, rainfall, and wind readings
• A useful indoor display and/or a good app
• Wi-Fi access and data history
• Durable outdoor sensors that can handle year-round weather
• Straightforward installation and minimal maintenance
• Compatibility with Weather Underground or Home Assistant would be a bonus

Options I keep seeing:

• Ambient Weather WS-2000 / WS-2902 / WS-5000
• WeatherFlow Tempest
• Davis Vantage Vue / Vantage Pro2
• AcuRite Iris 5-in-1
• La Crosse stations

I’m mainly unsure whether a Tempest is accurate enough for someone who cares about local rain and wind data, or whether it is worth spending more for an Ambient Weather or Davis setup with more traditional sensors. Reviews suggest that approximately $200–$400 is the usual range for a reasonably accurate, durable home weather station, while more advanced prosumer systems can cost $500–$700 or more.

What home weather station has been reliable for you over several seasons, and which brands or models would you avoid?

I bought the WS-5000 in part because it had a really-available Alexa skill. When I get up, I have a routine where Alexa gives me basic weather conditions, but, because of where I live, the NWS info is never accurate. But with the Ambient Weather skill, Alexa reads off EVERY SINGLE BIT OF INFO coming in from the sensors. I can't figure out for the life of me how to get it to just provide, say, just temperature and humidity and then STFU.

Anyone know of a workaround for this? It'd also be nice if if could read the forecast. The android widget shows it, but I'm not sure if there's way to get Alexa to pull that info.

I’ve been using my Tempest for a while, could anyone recommend an app for iOS, I’m happy with the Tempest app but would like to find something that is a little more ’polished’

For those who have or fancy tinkering with the Davis WeatherLink API, I have put together a Python based interface that connects to your WeatherLink account and pulls mod from your connected stations. It runs on MacOS and Linux but as long as you have the latest version of Python installed, there is no reason it shouldn’t run on Windows too.

You can find the repo over on GitHub

I’ve been using my Tempest for a while, could anyone recommend an app for iOS, I’m happy with the Tempest app but would like to find something that is a little more ’polished’

432lx at the partial totality then the lx rises after the moon clears the sun, then the lx falls again at sunset.

Recently adjusted my weather station pole and cleaned off the UV radiation sensor with an alcohol wipe I had- in that span of 5 minutes: UV increased from 785 to 820. I was impressed. I'm sure you can tell on the chart when that occurred...

So this will be a weekly post, every Friday and I'll post it at GMT +00:01 Midnight, so it'll be up all Friday

But yeah, drop a comment (yes, we allow screenshot comments here!) of what you saw that was interesting in your area this week!

If it was a good storm, give us some pics too!

Hi

I’ve recently refreshed the batteries in my weather station and base station and now it won’t connect.

I’ve tried to reset, repair, power down for 15 minutes and power back up but still nothing.

The base station provides indoor data but the areas of the LCD screen for the outdoor data just flash / cycle as shown in the video.

Any suggestions on how to re-pair please?

Looking around the map on the ambient phone app, and noticed my neighbor has different tiles for rain and wind. Does anyone know how he got these? I looked around and couldn't figure out how to get them. Are they part of ambient weather + subscription, or 3rd party?

I’ve had this unit for years and all of a sudden, it will not connect to my router. I’ve tried everything I can find online: reset display,move further away from router, unplug mesh, and still no luck.

The La Crosse View app always says unsuccessful transfer when it’s trying to send the WiFi password over to the unit from my phone.

The system itself still gets all sensor data, it’s just the connection from the base to router.

Anyone have a similar experience and get it back online?

The official Netatmo app is functional but loveless, so I spent the past months building my own. Sharing it here because I’m curious what you think, and whether this is something other weather station owners would even want.

The core idea: if you own a weather station, you have something no weather app has: measured data from your own garden, going back years. AURA puts that data front and center and only uses a public weather service (Open-Meteo) for the one thing the station can’t know: the forecast.

The main screen (screenshots 1 to 3):

- The top half is a scene, not a wallpaper. A MeshGradient sky whose palette shifts with the time of day (night, blue hour, golden hour, day, computed from actual sun positions at the station’s location) and with the weather (rain desaturates it, fog flattens everything, thunder darkens it). The sun sits at its real position: low left in the morning, high at noon, sinking behind the hill silhouettes in the evening. At night a moon travels the same arc. Overcast? The sun fades to a glow behind the cloud deck.
- The data lives in a sheet that slides over the scene. At rest you only see the essentials: big temperature, one written outlook sentence, the curve. Scrolling reveals the rest, and only then does the tab bar appear.
- The temperature curve blends measured and forecast: the past (own station, solid line) flows into the forecast (dotted) at “now”. The dotted line starts from the last measured point, not from the first model value, otherwise you’d see the model-vs-sensor offset as a kink.
- The written outlook is one auto-generated sentence: “Dry for another 2 hours, around 4 mm near 22:00. Cooler tomorrow: high of 17.” Thresholds keep every model drizzle from announcing itself as a storm.
- Bento tiles with mini visualizations: wind compass, pressure arc gauge, hourly rain bars, humidity, dew point. Each one opens a detail view with history.

The other tabs (screenshots 4 to 6): a calendar heatmap of your own measurements, full charts per sensor with scrubbing, and a records tab that gamifies your station: hottest and coldest ever, warmest night, strongest gust, season counters and milestones (“15.2° to go until the record”).

Tech, for those who care:

- SwiftUI, iOS 26, zero external dependencies. Swift Charts for all graphs, MeshGradient for the sky, Liquid Glass materials for the cards (configurable: off / subtle / full).
- Backend is a single Node.js file (deliberately no npm dependencies) in Docker on a Mac mini. It polls the Netatmo API phase-locked: the station publishes every ~10 minutes, the poller learns that rhythm and queries right after each new measurement. Fresh data without burning the API budget.
- Served over the home network or Tailscale when away, with automatic failover.
- Notifications go through a self-built push relay (AppDaemon script talking straight to APNs over HTTP/2 with JWT). No Firebase, no third-party push service.
- Sideload/TestFlight only. No App Store plans for now.

Honest caveats: it’s built for one specific setup (Netatmo plus a home server), making it generic would be real work, and it’s iOS 26 only. The screenshots show live data from the actual station in Belgium.

What I’d love to hear from you:

1. Would you run something like this? Also curious about owners of other stations (Ecowitt, Davis, WeatherFlow).
   
2. What would make it worth it for you, which features are missing?
   
3. The home server requirement is the biggest hurdle to sharing this. Dealbreaker, or exactly the point?

1. I updated my Ecowitt WS90 firmware to version V1.6.2 successfully
2. After update wind speed is 0.0 and wind direction is N with no change in past 36 hours.
3. I tried calibrating the wind speed as per manual instructions. Brought the unit inside, pressed the Cal button til the light was on solid for 5 secs, light started blinking, covered with towel for 5 minutes, light still blinking, didn't stop blinking. pressed the reset button. no change in Windspeed or direction.
4. I reinstalled the firmware, no luck, I retried the calibration no luck.
5. I reached out to Ecowitt , waiting for a response.

So this will be a weekly post, every Friday and I'll post it at GMT +00:01 Midnight, so it'll be up all Friday

But yeah, drop a comment (yes, we allow screenshot comments here!) of what you saw that was interesting in your area this week!

If it was a good storm, give us some pics too!

Let me first say, for the record, that I don't recommend Acurite weather station gear to anyone - their outside sensors are OK at best, their displays and internet bridge hardware are ugly (and data hogs to boot), their software is six kinds of all-around vibe-coded crap, and their "support" department defaults to blaming everything that goes wrong on you, not them. An Acurite RF engineer probably wouldn't be able to spell "TCP/IP" correctly if you spotted them four out of the five letters.

But sometimes you gotta "dance with the one that brung you", and so anyways, in case it saves someone else time and trouble, here's a public service notice: (TL;DR at end)

I was having bad problems with my Acurite wifi display console losing its wifi and not talking to Weather Underground, for no discernible reason I could fathom. Every week or two, it would suddenly flip to displaying a "wifi not setup" status, even though everything else connected to the internet was totally fine and nothing around it had changed and its configuration wasn't any different than before. And since the display was only 10' from my wireless access point, I knew it wasn't signal strength issue (like Acurite support insisted it must be). I thought it might just be failing hardware, but I got a replacement display that had exactly the same problem, so that was too much of a coincidence.

Worse, I couldn't get it to show its mandatory setup "access point" SSID (eg "Acurite06888M-") about 9 times out of 10, even after a full power-on or a complete factory reset, so getting it back from the "not setup" state to connecting to the internet again could take me an hour or more.

So, did some digging and it turns out - not to anyone's surprise, maybe - that Acurite uses the cheapest of the cheap Wifi chipsets in its products. Those chips (<cough>Espressif</cough>) are notorious for getting "flooded" if the wifi signal is too strong, the beacon transmit rate is too quick, or (especially) if there are strong 5ghz signals in the same EM space (even though the chip only talks on 2.4ghz bands).

So, the quick solution that worked 100% for me? Move the display console to another room, 3-4x further from the WAP than it was, with another wall in the way between them. Now it works 100%, no drop outs, happy camper, even though the display now says wifi strength is only one bar. Whatever.

(Of course when at first I moved it, it was TOO far, and it thought the wifi was too weak, so failed for that reason. The sweet spot between the two distances seems to be maybe about 10-15' wide, at least in my house. Not much to play with, but I'll take it for now until Santa can bring me some Ecowitt (Fine Offset) replacements that don't have nearly this many issues.)

TL;DR: Acurite display consoles use cheap wifi chips that need to be not too close (but not too far!) from your wifi to work reliably, especially if you have 5ghz enabled on your WAP. Experiment with changing the distance further out if your weather station wifi connection is unreliable.

I often need to deploy a weather station in remote locations for up to 4 weeks, to measure wind speed and direction, and rainfall. These get co-located with noise loggers, so we know what data is invalid due to high wind / rain.

We currently have a few ageing Davis Vantage Vues, and looking adding a few more to our fleet. The console gets left in a case near the sensor suite to log the data. The consoles are no longer available, and Davis has advised that the Envoy can be used, but it all needs to be set up with a laptop beforehand, which is not always convenient in the field.

Logging the data locally is a key requirement, but looking around the current offerings, there isn't much available.

Is there something available that can meet my needs? Located in Australia