3 Years with The Weatherflow Tempest: The Good, Bad, and The Ugly

hey everyone and welcome back to the channel it's been a while since we've had a gear review but this one is going to be a good one today we'll be reviewing the Tempest personal weather station by weather flow we're going to be talking about what makes it a great all-in-one weather station and also what its one major flaw is as you could see uh right behind me it's been mounted on my roof for nearly 3 years and it's been mounted at ground level for a couple months and it measures so many things and I can't tell you how many things it measures CU that would be just so boring I'm just going to put them all up here on the screen but the Tempest does a lot one of the great things about the Tempest is that you don't have to worry about going up on your roof and replacing batteries it's powered by a solar cell which the battery which recharges inside of the Tempest is meant to last about 10 years which will be the life of your weather station if it fails within 2 years weather flow will provide you a new new weather station at zero cost and if it fails within 10 years or 2 to 10 years I should say you'll get 60% off the cost of a new unit now you're probably wondering how I like the system and to be honest it's it's okay the wind updates every 3 seconds which is great with every other parameter updating just about every minute rainfall and lightning alerts are usually instantaneous which is is fantastic and of course one of the really cool things about the weather flows Tempest is that your phone computer or your tablet is your display so you can get your weather data wherever you are one of my favorite things about the Tempest is probably its lightning detector the detections as I said before are instantaneous and whenever I compare it to uh live radar on radar scope it's always very accurate so that's really cool I should also mention that weather flows uh Tempest does automatically publish your data to Weather Underground if you want to you just have to set up the API key through uh The Tempest online interface now it's really important that we talk about some of the issues with the Tempest I haven't had this personal issue but lots of people who live in areas of low sunlight have said that their Tempest Falls below the minimum voltage required for the system to operate so if you live in an area like Alaska or somewhere else that receives very little sunlight throughout the year or you're thinking about mounting your Tempest in a shady location that's going to be one thing you might need to consider about owning this weather station weather flow actually did release a power booster that you have to physically plug into an AC outlet and charge uh to remedy this issue but that's something that you'd have to pay extra for it's also kind of an inconvenience but again I get plenty of sunlight here in northeastern Pennsylvania as you can see it's quite cloudy and even even in the winter months even when it rains for days on end my Tempest stays charged of course other people have had issues with uh Hardware failures in general with the Tempest these are very few but I do feel that they're important to talk about people have had batteries fail and uh some solar units fail as well but these are very minimal uh reported issues I see them once in a while on the Facebook group and of course thousands of people own Tempest weather stations so to see a couple being reported here and there you're bound to find a few lemons which is very unfortunate but it's the truth with manufacturing processes today let's talk about the major downfall and the major problem with weather flows Tempest and that is the haptic rain sensor it's just bad comparing it to an on-site Coco Raz gauge with over a 100 data points The Tempest has an average error rate of 35% it's been off by as much as 5 100% And even though that's an outlier uh we do have uh especially with uh rainfall under 110th of an inch we have seen times where the Tempest is 100% accurate not often but sometimes it is so if rainfall accuracy isn't important to you this is a fantastic all-in-one weather station to get but if rain accuracy is important to you you might want to be careful with this weather station or get a manual rain gauge like a Coco Ros gauge in your backyard to measure that rainfall but just know that your rainfall will never be accurate the weather flow company has issued a Google form where you can enter calibration reports I did that for about 50 reports before I stopped doing it because it just wasn't making that much of a difference so you can try to calibrate your Tempest but honestly it's probably not going to work that well I did about 50 maybe 60 uh calibration reports and I hadn't seen any major uh Improvement another disappointing factor with weather flows Tempest is that there's no integrated way to store your data to a CSV or XML file if you want to do that you have to run an ambient uh Metro Bridge which is another $150 purchase or run a weather display software uh to Archive that data and that's a little bit hard not everyone wants to run a separate weather server and not everyone wants to spend another $150 as I said before uh weather flow does keep your data in a uh plot graph so you get like a little like uh bar graph or you get a like a little uh line graph and and that is kept at minimum uh data resolution for about 3 years minimum data resolution being about one day so get your high and low in that chart for one day for three years but there's no way to export that from uh weather flow's website which is really a shame of course you'll get your daily minimums and maximums uh forever so that's great another issue with this which isn't a big issue for everyone but if you're really nitpicky about your weather station this might be a problem for you and that is citing your weather station whenever you have an all-in one weather station you run into an issue of do I want to mount it so it's accurate for temperature and rainfall about 5T off the ground or do I want to mount it so it's accurate for wind speed at about 30 ft off the ground those are two decisions that you have to make or one decision you have to make really if you're going to be mounting this weather station now I wanted to have accurate wind measurements so I mounted it closer to 30 ft off the ground but again if you want to have that accurate temperature and rainfall reading you have to mount that temperature and rainfall sensor at about 5 ft off the ground so would I buy The Tempest again it just so happens that I'm in the market for a new weather station because I just recently moved to New Hampshire and I decided not to go with the Tempest that 35% error rate for rainfall was just too much for me and I really didn't want to have to deal with that and submit those calibration reports so I actually ended up going for a Davis Vantage Pro 2 that's in a completely different price range but it gives me that uh more options to mount uh my anemometer in a different place where I have my uh temperature and uh rain gauges on another spot so so that's where I ended up going The Tempest is great but if you really want rainfall accuracy in your personal weather station you might want to look at something with a tipping bucket because the weather flow Tempest is not great with rain thank you so much for watching this review I'm Thomas caran if you have any questions leave them down in the comments and of course you could join that fantastic Facebook group I'll link it in the description below thanks for watching

Channel: Thomas Kerrigan

Views: 6,532

Keywords: Weatherflow Tempest, Weather Station, Best Personal weather station, is the tempest a good weather station, tempest, personal weather station, review, weatherflow, tempestone, Tempest review, weatherflow tempest review, is the weatherflow tempest good, is the weatherflow tempest a good weather station, what weather station should I buy, best gift weatherstation

Id: ltKaytCCnX4

Length: 7min 55sec (475 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2023