La Crosse 5-in-1 professional wireless weather station

[Kete]

Hi,

Just writing to see if the La Crosse 5-in-1 is a known but not supported
weather station. It's a cheap station at a big box store, and the
Weather Underground recommends it.

I'm going through the supported hardware to find something as cheap
($100), but it's slow going.

--
Kete

[John Pierce]

I ran LaCrosse Costco grade krappe for years.   Believe me, its not worth the bother, its horribly inaccurate, its highly subject to UV plastic rot such that the weather instruments start crumbling in 12 months,. and the radio protocols and stuff are *awful*.      the last one I had involved like 4 pieces that connected wireless (432MHz?  I forget) to each other.      

1) indoor display panel, which was USB to a computer.   

2) outdoor radio hub + temp/barometer/humidity

3) outdoor wind speed+direction

4) outdoor rain bucket

each of these pieces had alkaline batteries that needed at least annual replacement, and each time you replaced batteries, you had to put ALL those pieces together on a table, and go through this awful RF sync procedure 2-3 times before it stuck.

I replaced that mess with an Accurite "5-in-1" which was  also Costco and also really cheap, and also really inacurate, and also had annoying quirks, but at least it was only two pieces, the instrument pod that you had to put up on a tall pole to get decent wind readings, and the indoor panel that was USB to the computer (I used a raspberry pi3 for this one).   It too is subject to UV plastic rot, but it lasts 2-3 years.  it has a solar charged odd AA batt (it wasn't NiCad or NiMH, but I forget what it actually was, not something normal) in the instrument head that lasts a couple years before going crusty enough to waste the whole weather station, without any warning.    the Accurite software protocols are ugly as sin, unoducmented, and had to be reverse engineered to work with WeeWX.    its REALLY slow reporting wind and rain, and the wind does NOT do 'gust' readings properly at ALL.

I just replaced it with a Weatherflow Tempest.    wow, night and day better.   Two pieces,   outdoor instrument,  that has a Lithium Titanium Oxide (LTO) battery that's lifetime, and is solar charged, and a little indoor radio hub that is USB Micro powerred, talks to the instrument via ??? radio magic, and talks to your network via wifi.      The wonderful thing is, it broadcasts the complete instrument readings every minute as a UDP broadcast packet in a simple JSON format, and the wind readings update continously, and both the rain and wind gauges are 'haptic' and use NO MOVING PARTS.   Now, I've only had this online for a ocuple days, but I'm loving it.       I moved weewx from a dedicated raspberry pi to a 'jail' on my FreeNAS/TrueNAS home file server, copying the same mysql database I've been using for the last 5 years, the wind updates every *SECOND*.   I'm still waiting for some rain, but I'm expecting *WAY* better results from what I've seen and read.

Weatherflow just had a Black Friday or Cyber Monday or some suck deal on the Tempest, it was like $250.

oh.   you do need a smartphone for the initial configuration of the Tempest, but it was so easy, your grandma could do it, and yes, it does automatically report your weather to the weatherflow network, like here's mine:

https://tempestwx.com/station/63574/

(click on the temp to drill down to the 'card' view, then click on any card to get a time graph)

here's the same station on WeeWX "Seasons" 

https://freescruz.com/weewx/

(any historical data before about noon on December 1st was from the AccuCrap).

if I didn't get this Weatherflow, I probably would have gone down the Davis Instruments bunny trail, but thats 2-3X the cost for the instrument I'd want, and a way more complicated install.

[Andy]

Really just the same experience as John. Started with the La Crosse 5-in-1 from Costco. Stumbled across weewx and the mwall driver while looking to ditch the windows laptop. "Upgraded" to the Costco Acurite 5n1. Tried the dual solar panel "pro"  fan cover. Went down the road with Acurite support, inaccurate outdoor temperatures, and broken aspirating fans. Now I use the SDR driver to collect the data. This allows me to use a different outdoor temperature sensor than the inaccurate one in the 5-n-1. 

Just bought the Tempest for $263 plus tax. Code BLACKFRIDAY still works. Thanks John.

Andy

[paul.ba...@gmail.com]

Dear John,

I have also a Tempest now for more than a year, connected to Weewx through a UDP driver, and agree with most of what you say.

The resolution is really impressive, both in time and data, but the precision is not that good and the politics of WeatherFlow is very strange, at least for me.

Considering the barometer for example, the resolution of .1 mbar is OK, and corresponds quite exactly with another electronic barometer, EXCEPT that there was an offset of ~8 mbar! They even changed this offset at least twice since the beginning, without any warning or information to me. There are a few other Tempest around, and they show the same dispersion on offset!

Considering the rain, the problem is really worse. Right, you can see the rain coming minute after minute,  but comparing the total rain after 24 hours with a more classical and much slower bucket system, shows the Tempest to be 1.5 times more than the other. The Tempest data are also incompatible with all historical data in the region.

And about humidity, the Tempest was way to high, staying at 100 % for hours while the smog was far from detectable. Then, suddenly 1 year after installation, the calibration was changed drastically by WeatherFlow, and the recorded data are now more acceptable. Hygrometers are known to be either bad or very expensive. My other instrument is of the first type and so I have nothing to compare with the Tempest. Same for the wind. It depends so much on the exact position where the wind is measured. I assume the wind speed to be correct.

The calibration problems are not a big deal. I find the silence politics of WeatherFlow a very bad one, that could easily be repaired by them. 

The rain measurements are more problematic. The "haptic" technology is conceptually promising, but I am afraid WeatherFlow went too far and is unable to produce good measures.  Wait and See!

Enjoy your Tempest for what it is, just don't expect too much. After all my previous critics I would immediately get the same if the first would disappear. I also keep my old IROX Pro X1...

Regards,     Paul

[vince]

If you're a WeatherFlow user, definitely subscribe to their forums and check in there occasionally.  The whole history of how the units evolved and info on what their weak/strong points are is located there, as is help and info from their support and engineering and beta tester folks (past beta tester here...)

FWIW - I found rain (for me near Seattle) hopelessly inaccurate, but the other sensors lined up ok with my VP2 and Ecowitt and roll-my-own sensor gear.   Watch for your Tempest reading high on hot calm days as the case heats up in the sun and holds that heat after the sun goes down.    I personally kinda liked the old Air (in the shade for temp+hum) and Sky (in the sun for wind+rain) setup better.

I would disagree with the comment about "silence politics".   They've proven to be rather open from what I've seen since the original Air+Sky were in beta, but yes it would be nice to know what (and if, and how much) they're tuning, as many people including me have asked.   We also have asked for a long time to have more control on tunings being on/off as well.

I saw one item in a public forum saying they have over 30,000 units online, so it'll be interesting to watch if their support structure and Internet-based architecture scales up.  I know there are many many happy users even with the known issues with the gear itself (inaccurate rain, no long-awaited AA-backed power booster available yet to get sites through the dark winter).  

They seem to have a lot of hardware failures but hopefully that's growing pains. You only hear the "mine is broken" complaints and not the huge "yup still works" of course.  Their support is great at working with the users to debug and replace questionable gear as things appear. At a minimum, they're overtly trying hard which is a big plus for me vs. dealing with most other companies.