Insulating Roofs

[twstanley]

Oh Oh! Wireless weather stations!

I bought one of these:

http://www.ambientweather.com/wmorscwiprwe.html

Off eBay for a 'buy myself what I want' Christmas present in January 2005. It has worked great ever since, no battery replacements or anything. All the wireless remote sensors have solar panels to charge the batteries.

Then you get a simple 9 pin serial cable, and this software:

http://insvr1.midcoastwater.com.au/F...sgg/f10000.htm

Which is free, and that weather station hooks to your pc, will do web page uploads ( here is ours ):

http://www.stanleyranch.us/weather.html
http://www.stanleyranch.us/weather1.html

The rain fall for the last 24 hours is not working, we got about 1.7 inches of rain last night which we really, really needed. I may have to get a new version of the software to see if that is fixed.

And even upload data to weather underground ( I haven't signed up for a site id for them yet ).

Anyhow, I love mine, I have the anemometer on the mast our wireless internet antenna is on, the rain gauge is on the railing of the deck in back. The outside temperature and humidity sensor is on the front ( north ) of the house and I think it reads a bit high in the afternoon due to reflected heat but I haven't bothered moving it. I need a spot that is shady all day long, maybe underneath one of the trees in the front yard....haha.

I'm not a a real serious weather buff, but I really enjoy knowing what the weather is doing at our house...the graphing and data collection of that software is pretty nice as well.

Oh and after installing the ductless mini split a/c unit in our family room, I am really sold on them. No cooling loss to the ducts at all. You can get a multi ton outdoor unit and then install multiple indoor units to get the cooling right where you need it, I would assume you would end up with one per room pretty much...

[Pat]

TWSTANLEY, Thanks dude. I have been to some vendors sites, thisi one included, before but haven't made up my mind which unit I want or where to get it.

I want the rain gauge out away from the house so it isn't in an eddy or anything. North side is good for temp but there are effects that most folks ignore. Transpiration and evaporation of a lawn and tree will effect temps too. The standard is one of the white louvered enclosures the weather service promotes. I'm probably not that needy of getting data compatible with the approved collection methodologies. Why would I need to defend my methods to NIST (ex National Bureau of Standards) or anyone?

One of the requirements I levied on the heat and air design was no ducts in unconditioned spaces. We didn't make it. It was just too hard. Most of the ducts are in conditioned spaces so are uninsulated. In the specific instances where we had to run through an unconditioned space (attic or whatever) we insulated the ducts very well. I have no plasitc forced air heat and A/C ducting. It is all galvanized steel well sealed at the joints. Much of it is custom for my application.

For example above the decorative oak facade that obscures the peak of the ceiling in the great room there are two large triangular cross section ducts. They are below the ceiling insulaltion but are hidden above oak panels. There was no other convenient way to get air past the cathedral ceiling from one side of the house to the other. I think that in my instance, there was economy of scale going with central units and ducts as opposed to distributed units with few or no ducts.

Well, actually I guess I kinda sorta did both. I have three heat pumps and two propane furnaces. This is distributed heat and air but the distributed units have distribution ducts as well. If some design tradeoff would have prohibited having most of the ducts in conditioned spaces then before accepting all the ducts in unconditioned spaces I would have been looking at split ductless distributed systems. There are just too many opportunities for losses when running ducts in unconditioned spaces.

Oh... by the way I noticed cloud base height. So does that imply that you have a ceiliometer? Probably not! They run over $10K So does your station "CALCULATE" the cloud base height based on temp, humidity, and known lapse factors related to altitude or do you get the info from other nearby sources and simply mirror it?

Our ISP provides hosting for a web site at no extra charge and I even speak HTML and have designed and built web sites but just haven't taken time to do it. I suppose I might after I ger a weather station. The WX underground looked like a good idea too.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[twstanley]

The weather station must calculate cloud base height thru some means, I certainly don't have anything to really measure it.

I was thinking about how the temperature reads a bit high in the afternoon, I think that the sun may be actually hitting the thermometer housing at that time of day, I can possibly mount it up against the undserside of the eave and eliminate that. Possibly using some sort of shield around it would work as well, but as you said, I'm not sure how much effort I want to put in.