Monday, November 16, 2009

Choosing a Home Weather Station

By Bill Stewart

There are a lot of different home weather stations on the market today. The vast selection can make the task of choosing a home weather station a difficult one. That task can be complicated by finding the weather station that fits your own particular needs. The following tips may help you as you make the choice.

On thing you will find is that there have been many technological advances in the area of home weather stations. Those advances have allowed manufacturers to be able to offer home weather stations at a lower price than ever before. They have become affordable for a large section of the public.

As the prices of weather stations have dropped, the number of products available have increased. There are so many good weather stations that making the correct choice has become very difficult.

Of course, you can still find a traditional rain gauge as well as an alcohol filled thermometer. However, most home weather instruments are now digital in nature.

These digital instruments have many advantages. Sensors can be placed in the proper place outside while the readouts are read from the comfort of your home office. Some of the digital instruments have memories to store data. Seeing trends can help you to form your own forecasts at your own home.

In addition, digital instruments are more accurate and take away the errors often made by human beings.

As you shop, you will find many cheap home weather stations. Most of them are made cheaply and are inaccurate. You should plan to spend several hundred dollars to get a decent home weather station. The product that you receive should last a long time and offer great customer support if something is not working correctly. You can also use the internet to find a product's rank.

There are certain features that you should look for in a weather station. At a minimum, the station should offer the temperature, both inside and outside, as well as the relative humidity. In addition, you will want to know the wind speed and direction and have a rain gauge. Many home weather stations offer several other functions.

Some of the major manufacturers of home weather stations include Rainwise, La Crosse, Davis Instruments, Peet Bros., and Oregon Scientific.

Rainwise is both most expensive and top of the line. Some stations from Rainwise cost several thousand dollars. LaCross instruments cost in the one hundred fifty to three hundred dollar range while the stations made by Davis Instruments are in the range of five to six hundred dollars.

Oregon Scientific and Peet Bros. make instruments that are very similar to La Crosse and Davis Instruments, respectively.

Some of the home weather stations allow you to transfer data to your home computer.

If you are choosing a home weather station from any of these five companies, you will be choosing a station the is accurate and should give you many years of service. If you are tired of the forecast given on television that is always wrong, you can start to make your own models and forecasts as an amateur meteorologist. You may have just as good a chance as the guy on television at getting it right.

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