You need to know what weather will be in the next few days and you do not have any weather sensors at home? There is an app for that on your mobile phone — a little weather prediction tool that can only tell you about the weather in the environment around you. But a weather 10 km away can be much different from your location, so for detailed weather information right at your place, you need a powerful tool you can add to your space: A weather station with different weather sensors.
There are three different weather stations:
1. Simple home weather stations or combination of different weather sensors
Home-based weather systems provide accurate and reliable weather monitoring in a self-contained, easy-to-install system. Each of these home weather sensors and stations are usually user-friendly and have large, easy-to-read displays that monitor and provide current weather conditions such as indoor and outdoor temperatures, humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed, and rainfall. The latest models are usually outfitted with Integrated WiFi connectivity and smartphone apps that will allow you to know your personal readouts whenever and wherever you need. But huge shortcoming of these home stations is accuracy and integration since they cannot be integrated in any building automation system or other smart home systems.
2. Compact weather stations
In case of integration better solution are compact weather stations or multiple weather sensors combined to one CNS system. You can use these weather sensors to control your smart home, hotel, business building… Andivi weather sensors can measure temperature, humidity, wind speed, sunlight, detect darkness and precipitations. The measured values are converted into an analog signal in the range between 0-10V or 4-20mA, depending on the Weather Sensor or station model. This allows you to connect stations to all standard control and monitoring systems, with which you can then perform various actions within your smart home or building automation or management systems.
3. Professional meteorological stations
The third weather stations are complex meteorological stations that consist of various combinations of intelligent meteorological sensors to capture various weather phenomena. Such meteorological systems are usually implemented in large building automation as well as for professional applications and purposes such as e.g. mountaineering, airports, local weather centers, etc. These stations are extremely accurate and durable and due to the variety of weather sensors offer different meteorological station configurations. Andivi is the official distributor for Lambrecht Meteo meteorological stations that can offer you a professional weather station for professional use cases.
What affects on Performance of weather sensors?
Many different factors affect the relative performance of a weather monitoring system. Performance does not only depend on the quality of sensors although Andivi sensors are high quality with a 3-year guaranty but also on robustness, size of weather sensor, location of installation, proper integration, and other factors.
Robustness
Performance is defined by your unique measurement needs. For example, if you are measuring in a remote location where you cannot access the site routinely, you will need extremely robust instrumentation. Robust weather sensors are also needed if people’s lives are at stake (i.e., if a sensor breaks and a flash flood is not detected, people’s lives could be in jeopardy). in these situations, the robustness of weather sensors will drive the relative performance.
Size of weather sensors and location of installation
Size is an important factor to consider when installing weather station. With small dimensions, installing compact weather stations in most locations is possible. The location of your weather sensors is the most important part of the installation. If your weather sensors /station is located under a tree or an overhang, the rainfall data measured by the station will not be correct. If you place your weather station in an alley, you could very well get a wind tunnel effect on the anemometer, resulting in erroneous wind data. Your weather station should have a good distance from any other tall object and surface types that affect for example the temperature (asphalt). Install the station over a natural surface (like grass) far from walls or trees that cast shadows on the housing, block rain from accessing the rain sensor, or shield the wind from hitting the anemometer.
Integration
Typically, compact weather stations provide either analog output signal (0-10V or 4-20mA) or RS485 Modbus output through a cable that easily connects to a datalogger or SCADA system. You can use one compact weather station or many different weather sensors that you connect to one weather managing system. In the case of a compact weather station, one cable can deliver data from many sensors with one communication protocol. With various weather sensors, each sensor can have its own cable and output. As a result, on stations with multiple brands of instruments, it is possible to have various communication protocols. Whilst most dataloggers will be able to read the data from multiple protocols, it makes installation and integration a more difficult task. However, for some applications having different outputs specific to the instrument makes fault-finding an easier task as the offending sensor can be isolated quickly.
What type of weather sensors or station do you choose depends on what level of complexity you want to measure weather, for what reasons, and also how important stable and continuous measurements are to you? Each type has its advantages and disadvantages. But in the end, the most important thing is that they help automate the process of smart homes or smart buildings and prevent damage due to adverse weather conditions.
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