Didsbury Alberta Unoffical Weather Station

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!

Replaced main sensor unit battery again.  Noticed today that the console was reporting a Low Battery on Station 1. Look into the log files, I had 3 outages over the last week from that sensor unit.

This battery was just replaced August 1, 2015.  Luckily I had an extra battery, so I ran out in the -21 Celsius evening and replaced the battery.  The backup battery should last for 8 months without any solar panel assistance, so the batteries I purchased to replace must have been bad batteries.  Hopefully this fixes the issue.

Also noticed that the new batteries for the 24 hour Fan-Aspirated Shield don’t appear to be working that well.  The fan was not running the other day when I checked on the unit, but today 4 hours after dark, the fan was still spinning.  I’ll have to look into this.