tinkering with a WH1091

hills · **Posted:** Sun Dec 27, 2009 6:46 am

After reading this forum I decided I had to make some modifications to my WH1091

First I moved it up the mast to get away from the heat of the tiles, but this made its rain gauge too unstable so I welded up a rock solid rain gauge mount. I hope it is far out enough from the other sensor so that they don't affect it, but I'd rather put up with that, than with .3mm of rain each time the wind gusts.

Then I was worried about the temp sensor getting too hot so with 3 plastic dessert bowls, one coat hanger, 6 wall plugs and the left over rain gauge mount, I made another enclosure. This seems to have brought the temp down to where I expected it to be:

I'm still tinkering so your thoughts and advice is very welcome!!

daj · **Posted:** Sun Dec 27, 2009 7:57 pm

looks good to me. I had a similar problem with the wind causing false recording of rain

The hooded Claw · **Posted:** Mon Dec 28, 2009 12:26 am

Hills, .............Have you "asperated" that Temp gauge cover or just let it do it "Naturally" .............Must do mine (just plannig a "Work around" of siting the fan at the top & "Hanging it" from the same point)

Tricky........... (Still "Formulating a plan for that!!)

hills · **Posted:** Mon Dec 28, 2009 3:23 am

No its just doing naturally, but now you've put the idea in my head, I've seen novelty baseball hats around with a small solar panel and a fan built into the peak. That would make a great ventilation system. I think Ive seem one around here somewhere...

hills · **Posted:** Mon Dec 28, 2009 5:36 am

ok I can now tell you its ventilated by a small solar powered fan thanks to my son's school science project from last year and another piece of my dear wife's picnic setting.

When I took it off to make the modifications the temperature went up by about 2 degrees and now its on the way back down again.

hills · **Posted:** Fri Jan 01, 2010 2:15 am

I was happy with the performance of my "proof of concept" temp sensor cover, so I have rebuilt to be a bit more solid. Here is the end result.

Now the temperature up here in the hills is consistantly a few degrees cooler than the plains and matches a mercury thermometer I have mounted by the side door, which is under the eaves and a car port. All up cost was under $10 (although I did pinch the plastic picnic set from my wife

)

beteljuice · **Posted:** Fri Jan 01, 2010 2:45 am

What's the lower (picnic) set ?

hills · **Posted:** Fri Jan 01, 2010 4:12 am

beteljuice wrote:

What's the lower (picnic) set ?

experiment no.2

Seeing if it reduces the radiant heat that comes up off the tiles.

TNETWeather · **Posted:** Fri Jan 01, 2010 4:15 am

Its hard to prevent heat from rising... could you not put the temp sensors down near the ground (typically 6ft over grass)...

hills · **Posted:** Fri Jan 01, 2010 4:23 am

Haha true, but I'm going to give it my best shot! :lol:

I can't really move it too far as it has to be connected to the other sensors and being in a bush fire danger area the wind speed and direction is by far the most important factor to me, so I'd rather have the temp out a bit and the wind sensors up high to be as accurate as possible.

hills · **Posted:** Fri Jan 01, 2010 7:58 am

I've built a new rain catcher 3 times the area of the original and with significantly steeper sides, so hopefully now I will be able to measure in .1mm rather than .3mm. By my calculations the diameter of the catchment area has to be 138.8mm. I'll compare it to the manual rain guage and make any further adjustments through the calibration. At this point it is just .33 times.

Again comments and advice is welcomed!

Unfortunately I've given myself another .8mm rain in doing so. I stopped cumulus and disconnected the WH1091 before doing the work. Then before reconnecting it I cleared the rain and then restarted cumulus, but the 2.4mm (.8 after calibration) was still sent through. I then stopped cumulus again and edited the Jan10log.txt but I can't seem to clear the values. What else do I need to edit to clear the rain values?

RCE · **Posted:** Fri Jan 01, 2010 8:49 am

From the year rollover thread...

TNETWeather wrote:

Feels like we had -4.62in this past year... Actually we were -7+ inches under normal this year.

Just in case anyone is not sure what to do...

Look in the data directory where your cumulus is installed in.

2 files will need to be modified.

FIRST, shutdown Cumulus normally

Jan10log.txt

Remove the negative rain for the year. For example, mine was -4.62, just changed to 0.00

today.ini

Change the start= to 0.00 in the [rain] Section like

Code:

[Rain]
High=0
HTime=00:00
Start=0
Yesterday=0

After you have completed that, you can restart Cumulus and it should show 0.00 (assuming you are not having rain during the beginning of the new year. If that is the case, you should be able to see how much rain you got and adjust as needed.

hills · **Posted:** Fri Jan 01, 2010 9:54 am

Excellent thanks for that. I don't know what I was doing wrong, I deleted every reference of rain from every file I could find using excel and then saving it back as a csv, but with a .txt extension, reset the station but it continually stated there was 2.5mm of rain.

Anyhow as I only had 4 days of data and most of that was collected while I was messing around with it, I've decided to move the data directory out of the way and start from scratch. I guess there's no better day to do this than 01/01

hills · **Posted:** Sat Jan 02, 2010 12:18 am

Ok I have to stop reading this forum, you've given me another enhancement. I have installed 3 side stays to keep the sensors at the top stable.

That's it no more enhancements!!

gwheelo · **Posted:** Sat Jan 02, 2010 4:49 am

Here is a rain gauge mod for Oregon - total luck that a found a funnel exactly 4 X the original catch area and with almost straight sides for the first few centimeters. Super glue did the rest.

GW

Attachment:

IMG_0798_low.jpg

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tinkering with a WH1091

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