Choosing A Weather Station For Your Home
A residential weather station simply put is a place where there is equipment used to monitor atmospheric conditions. Generally amateur home weather stations are simple and monitor only a few things such as temperature, outside and inside, and humidity levels, or they could be a bit more sophisticated and monitor wind speeds, heat index, rainfall, barometric pressure, and dew point. Some weather stations gives weather forecast displays, storm warning alarms and weather tendency indicators. Some people have wireless weather stations in their home. These have become very popular over the past few years because they are, as their name suggests wireless and can be placed anywhere in the home as long as they remain within receiving distance of the base unit placed outside. Some people prefer a wired weather station. These do tend to cost a bit less than wireless but require a bit of work. Some believe that these wired weather stations give more accurate data then do wireless. The placement of a wired weather station is directly related to the length of cable you have. You'll want to decide before you purchase a wired weather station exactly where you want it to be and make sure that you have enough cable to run outside to the base unit. Some weather stations are very professional like. They include things like a thermo-hygrometer which measures humidity and heat index, an anemometer which measures wind speed and direction, a baro- hygrometer which measures indoor temperature and humidity and barometric pressure and a rain gauge which measures rainfall and keeps track of current rainfall or accumulated rain fall. A lot of these home weather stations are based on world weather stations such as the one located on top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. Mt. Washington has some of the lowest wind chill reading in the world. There are many well known manufacturers of wire and wireless weather stations. Some of the best known are La Crosse, Oregon Scientific, Davis and Acu-Rite or Acurite. These manufactures make many different models and styles, some discount models. A home weather station really is a great way to get your children involved in learning about weather. Just think, after one year you'll know things like on which day you had record high and low temperatures, record low wind chills, record high wind gust, as well as average wind speed. You'll know which date had record rain fall, which date the least amount of rainfall and which date had record rain within a one hour time frame. Keeping a weather station is a great family project. |
