I used to own a forerunner of the WMR200 so it was a surprise to me upgrading the h/w to the WMR200 that the rain gauge is the only sensor that does not have solar power. Since it is situated on the roof of the house, this means that (based on current battery life) 3 times a year I’m going to have to climb up there to change the batteries and the re-level the gauge with a spirit level having disturbed it to change the batteries.
In the handbook Oregon Scientific show the rain gauge mounted in the garden. Obviously if that’s where it was located then it’d be far less trouble to change the batteries. However it would then be at risk of being stolen or damaged by curious cats wandering through the garden. It’s an expensive piece of kit so I’d rather not take that risk.
On the predecessor weather station (WMR928N) everything was solar powered.
I wonder why Oregon Scientific decided not to provide solar power for the rain gauge.
Not sure if we use the same rain bucket or not…but I hate having to remove 6 8 tiny screws to get the cover off the battery compartment to change them. And the 2 screws that hold the bucket to the tipper stripped out the first time I opened it up. I am going to re-do my mount system, and when I do that I am also going to remote the batteries for the rain bucket so I can change them without having to open the whole thing up. When I do it I will take pictures.
None of the WMR100 sensors are solar but luckily the main unit is easy to change the batteries. I’ve yet to run them out of juice so not sure how long they would last. I have to remove my sensors when I move so i change the batteries out before I remount the sensors.
OS probably wanted to keep the price down on the WMR200 so elected to go with batteries on the rain bucket. Ideally, the rain bucket should be close to the ground. But the companies that make the stations, even Davis, don’t make it easy to separate the sensors. OTOH I enjoy having almost all my sensors on one mount, makes mounting on the RV relatively easy. Of course my readings suffer for it, but then whose don’t…
My WMR200 rain gauge is a little over a year old and still on the original batteries.
I have the outdoor temp/hum separate from the anemometer, so that doesn’t have a solar panel either[1], but it is also on the original batteries.
The anemometer, the only WMR200 unit with a solar panel in my setup, is also the only unit for which I’ve needed to change the batteries - but it does transmit more often, so that’s fair enough.
[1] You can now get a extra solar panel, but on current performance I’ll probably not go that route.
Only 6? Lucky man. :lol: There are 8 on the WMR200 (plus the 2 on the cylinder)!
Curiously the battery cover on the T/H just slides off!
Okay so the rain gauge is a rain gauge, but the battery compartment is well away from the water path - in some ways the battery compartment of the T/H is probably more exposed to damp (e.g. driving rain)…
I think that Kojack was going to drill a hole in the battery cover of his WMR200 rain gauge - so that he could click the reset without having to remove all those screws.
I have lithium batteries installed because of the extreme winter temps (-34C) Energizer claims they will last longer, put them in October 2008.
All other battery types will rupture because of the water content, consumer lithium batteries were the best choice for me
So if you want extended battery life look at a lithium type battery
I have seen military grade lithium batteries on the Internet that claim to be good for -60 C and years of life.
I drive by a battery world shop I will stop in this fall and look at some other batteries . . . . military grade types.
That brings up my pet question has anyone got the battery tags to work for the WRM200,
If so how ?
I think with growing numbers of WMR200 users having battery tags would be a good tag.
( Yes I know the console has a battery icon for each sensor)
Yes, I meant 8…that post was before coffee this morning :oops: #-o
I think the WMR100 and 200 use the same rain bucket. And I would guess the battery life would be tied in with the amount of rainfall at a specific location.
Would that have much impact? So far as I’m aware the sensor broadcasts at 46(?) second intervals, rain or no rain.
FWIW, we’ve had ~2100mm of rain in the just over 12 month life of the current set of WMR200 rain gauge batteries.
On my former weather station, the WMR928N, its rain gauge bucket looked identical but wasn’t. It had an attached solar power unit with rechargeable backup battery and then alkaline batteries in case they both failed, and all of those were in the solar power unit so no need to disturb the rain bucket.
I think its a retrograde step by OS to have the batteries inside and locked away behind those 8 non-capture screws.
It turned out when I got on the roof that the batteries were fine, even so I changed them and hit the reset because having opened it up it seemed pointless to put the original batteries back in again - I can use them for the kids toys instead.
The rain bucket is screwed to a piece of heavy railway sleeper that sits on top of an upstairs dormer window (flat roof) and is levelled by shuffling the gravel beneath it. Obviously we must have had some very strong winds because the sleeper, complete with rain bucket, was blown over onto its side.
Having righted everything and changed the batteries and reset the rain bucket, there is still no signal being received from it.
So I guess I’ll have to get on the roof again and bring it down to ground level and find a spot for it in the garden and at least that way I can experiment with getting it up and running again without keep having to get the ladders out and climb on the roof.
Questions about poor reception from the rain gauge are probably the second most common WMR200 related question here (guessing that data logging related questions would be the most common).
The solution seems to involve experimentation till you find a combination that works.
Even where my WMR200 console is now, well away from any computers, and only ~20m and a double block cavity wall from the rain gauge the console still has the occasional intermittent — (but fortunately not a problem because its single is picked up just fine by the RFXCOM receiver).
The annoying thing is that the rain gauge signal has been ok since I bought this station in July 2008 and it’s only in the last few days that the signal has gone off. Admittedly the station is on my desk within 3ft of 4 PCs all with active WiFi, 5 cordless phones, 2 mobiles and 2 Bluetooth headsets but it’s quite close physically to its sensors and normally has no problem.
Trouble is, once I get the rain gauge off the roof and put it in the garden then it will be much further away than it is at present.
I guess another idea would be to walk along the roof and re-site it to on the roof of my study where it will then only be 4ft from the station.
It’s just the weather to be up on the roof - wet and very windy :roll:
I have resited mine only 10m from the console; it is in fact a replacement which I purchased from a forum member.
So far, so good. The antenna is a real schoolboy design. I am thinking of redesigning it.
Today I took mine down from the roof and placed it in the back garden. It probably is about 10m from the base as yours is. I dismantled it again to be able to reset it - a bit of paranoia really - the handbook says that new devices must be paired within 30 minutes of a reset, but that existing devices can be re-acquired any time. Since it did not re-acquire last time I decided to try the reset again. It still did not re-acquire.
I decided to try moving the base nearer to the rain gauge and unplugged the power and the USB cable, relying on its batteries, and before I could move it off the desk it re-acquired the rain gauge. So I reconnected it again and after about 20 mins it lost the rain gauge again.
Tomorrow I’ll bring the rain gauge indoors and set it up a few feet away to see if it acquires and remains acquired.
I have got one additional radio device where the base station is - the FIT-PC Slim that is being used to handle the weather station, so I connected an RJ45 cable to the router and switched of the wireless radio. However that made no difference.
If the rain gauge works fine at close range then I might put it back on the roof but located directly over the room where the base is.
Quick update: bringing the rain gauge into the house into the room next to the weather station causes it to connect ok. So I guess there must be a weak signal to noise factor despite the rain gauge having new Duracell alkaline batteries. So I’ll have to find a site closer to the weather station, which is peculiar since the rain gauge has been in its current location working just fine since July 2008 until a few days ago when it suddenly was no longer able to maintain a connection.
You’ve very likely already considered this but I suppose another possibility might be the recent arrival in the close neighbourhood of some other 433MHz device operating on the same channel and with a stronger signal?
Presumably it would need to be something that made pretty much full time use of the channel for it to block the rain gauge like that.
I bought a FIT-PC Slim and put it within 3 ft of the weather station. I considered that maybe its wireless link to my router is causing the problem, so I fitted an RJ45 cable and switched off its radio. Now I’m thinking maybe the CPU is radiating so I’m going to order a USB extension cable and mount it about 3ft further away from the base station.
Nothing else has changed - only the addition of that new PC. Having said that, it’s a difficult environment radio-wise: within 4 ft there are 3 laptops on WiFi, 4 DECT Phones, two mobile phones, 2 Bluetooth headsets, and one cordless door bell. But they’ve all been there for all time except for the FIT-PC Slim (mentioned above) dedicated to serving the weather station.
I’ll buzz back when the USB extension appears and I can mount the FIT-PC slim a bit further away.
By ‘close neighbourhood’ I was allowing for things well beyond where the console is, maybe even beyond your house/property.
433MHz is apparently used by quite a range of different things nowadays.
For example, I have a ‘free’ wireless power meter from the electricity board. That uses a clamp/sensor around the incoming supply, and a wireless console. I simply can’t get the console to register the sensor at all - and I think that that is because of all the 433MHz weather sensors!
Maybe a neighbour somewhere within a few hundred metres (probably less, but…) has just installed something that conflicts. I seem to recall that things like automatic garage doors use 433MHz?
You used to have a WMR928. You mention on your web page that you brother now has that. Is he close by?
The rain gauge sensor from a WMR928 broadcasts on just the same channel and at the same interval as the WMR200 rain gauge, but the WMR928 transmitter is (or at least seems to be) stronger.
Most of the time having both is not a problem, as they broadcast at different moments, but gradually the relative moment of transmit will drift together till they reach a point where they are both transmitting at just the same time. When that happens, depending on relative positioning, the WMR928 signal can easily drown out the WMR200 one.
With my pair this happens at around 3 month intervals and knocks out the signal from the point of view of the WMR200 console for 2-3 days (the RFXCOM receiver seems able to discriminate better and only looses the WMR200 rain gauge for around a day). Doing a reset of either gauge would clear the problem, but then the next conflict would be random - choosing not to reset gives the longest time between conflicts.
I imagine that different individual samples of equipment might conflict at different intervals, and the longer the interval between conflicts the longer the time of conflict.
Just the same thing happens with the anemometers but more frequently and for less time - a few hours every 7(?) days IIRC. It took me quite a while to twig the cause of the WMR200 anemometer blackouts. I used to be out clicking the reset every time. Now I don’t bother!
So far I’ve not seen the two outdoor temp/hum units conflict.
