PREMIUM Weather Station for Home Assistant! (WeatherFlow Tempest Weather System)

what's up smart homers my name is Aaron and in this video I want to show you the weatherflow Tempest weather station a super smart weather station that works locally with homeless [Applause] [Music] [Applause] system I'm going to unbox it show you some of it features how the app works how easy it is to integrate with home assistant and then I'm going to give you a little comparison between this and the EIT Whit boy which I covered in a previous video I do have to say that this was sent to me by ratio but they didn't tell me anything I have to say about it so it's going to be an honest review The Tempest weather station is a compact device that can measure outdoor air temp and relative humidity do point and feels like temperatures barometric pressure wind speed and direction lightning activity rain duration and accumulation wet bulb temperature UV index brightness and more out of the box you get the weather station itself a compression collar mount a base station with power supply and a wood screw if we take a look at the sensor unit you have the top of the device where the haptic rain sensor resides you have the Wind Gap with the Four Wind sensors where wind speed and direction are measured and then you have the section underneath where the temperature and humidity sensors are the black patches on the side of the device are solar panels which keep this thing charged on the bottom there's a pre-installed flat Mount that you can remove from the device so you get two types of Mount with this device the flat Mount that can be screwed to something horizontal with the provided wood screw and the compression collar for a 1-in pull mount under the mount you have some device information including the device ID which you'll definitely need later you also have the switch to turn the unit on setting it up is super simple because they give you 5 minute setup instructions and so you can just follow those install the app and Power on the base station once you install the app and create an account you turn on the sensor unit via the switch on the bottom and then you wait for the app to detect the base station tap the base station when it does set your location and then the base station will detect the sensor verify the device that appears is the correct device number from the bottom of the sensor unit and then tap that continue on to enter your Wi-Fi credentials and then you're all set up before we dive into the app we should install the device where we want to have it permanently set up so that we can see accurate weather data in the app the pull mount has an arrow on it that shows you Which Way North should face so it's important to note that when you're installing remove the compression collar slide the collar and base over the pole and then screw on the collar tightening the base against the pole I didn't actually have a 1-in pole that I could use I'm using a curtain rod actually so I had to slip a little piece of wood in between the collar and the pole in order to make it it a little bit bigger so the compression collar would tighten down once it's secure and the mount's arrow is facing north go ahead and install the sensor unit onto the mount by setting it onto the base and then twisting it into place the arrow on the sensor should also face North now after that you're done with the installation in the app you get a nice little forecast from the web but you get the real-time information from your sensor as well in the history tab you get statistical data for different time intervals if you head back to the main page and then tap the image of the weather station in the upper right corner here you'll see live data reported from the weather station tapping any one of these data will show you a time trend for the data in a nice clean format you can zoom this time span in or out as necessary to see more data overall the app is a lot cleaner than the Eco app that I showed in a previous video but a lot of features aren't there which I'll discuss later on okay so that's pretty much it now for app features let's go ahead and add this thing to home assistant first of all there is a native weatherflow integration for home assistant and its iot class is local push which is the best class because it means that all of the data is transfer to home assistant directly over your network without going to the cloud first in home assistant go to settings devices and services and tap add integration search for weatherflow and tap it and you'll see a success message that pops up both your Hub and the sensor unit are going to show up as devices and home assistant but the hub's not going to actually have any entities and it's a sensor you care about the Sens has a ton of entities I'm not going to read them all to you since you could just see them right here but you could see the data for wind rain light and air pressure and one notable entity here that the Eco did not have is the lightning count sensor I'm not really sure how this is measured but apparently it can measure lightning strikes a piece of data that was missing that the Eco it had that I really wanted was daily accumulation of rain in order to address this I ended up creating a utility meter Helper and home assistant that tracks the accumulated rainfall what's cool is that if you name it correctly it'll show up in the Tempest device page as if it's one of the entities that belongs there I'm not sure if this is on purpose with home assistant or accident but I do like it to do this click settings devices and services click the helpers tab in the top and then click create helper at the bottom of the list choose utility meter this is a little hack to use the utility meter helper format for rain accumulation since tracks the consumption of various utilities over set intervals we're going to use it to track the accumulation of rain over a set interval name the helper in the same format as the Tempest weather station entities but followed by daily accumulation choose the Tempest weather station precipitation entity as the input sensor and set the master reset cycle to daily click submit at the bottom in my EET video I plotted the data from the EET weather station with a bucket style range engage to compare the two and get an idea of the accuracy of the weather station in this video I'm going to plot The Tempest weather station with those two to get a comparison of all three looking at the comparison charts you can see that the total accumulation matches the ecet at the beginning but it soon is Left Behind and Falls pretty short of the EIT and the mechanical gauge I wonder if this is the same reason that the EET seems to fall short of the mechanical gauge the pooling of water on the top of the haptic sensor looking at the rain rate though it was higher for the The Tempest and for the other two sensors yet the total accumulation was lower not really sure what's going on there let's go through the other sensor comparisons though and then we'll talk about calibration the temperature and humidity were almost dead on compared to the Eco which is pretty cool and indicates to me some similar or similarly accurate sensors wind speed showed some correlation but the wind direction really didn't at all I think there are two factors that had an impact here first the sensors may not have both been facing due north although I tried to align them as best I could could and second the Eco was positioned in a place that may have had more Shelter From The Wind than the Tempest or the wind may have wrapped around the house and hit the Tempest differently than the Eco lastly the illuminance measurements were pretty close I really didn't expect this based on what I've seen from other luminum sensors but they stayed together pretty much all the time with the Peaks being a little bit higher on the Tempest okay so now let's talk about calibration actually here is where I get a bit annoyed with weather flow the weather flow actually has automated calibration this is where they take users weather data from many different weather stations and use that data to calibrate your sensors if that rubs you the wrong way you might ask if you could just perform a calibration yourself manually but the answer is not without the consent of weatherflow in order to make the adjustment you have to contact weatherflow with quantitative analytical data and instrumentation information to show that the sensors need to be adjusted and weather flow will adjust them for you this this doesn't sound like you have control of your own data is worth comparing this calibration method with how the EIT was calibrated if you saw my EIT video there was a whole page of calibration off sense and gains that you could use to dial in your sensors just the way you wanted anyway that's pretty much it for this video I hope this gave you a good idea of some of the features of this device and also how it compares to the Eco it if you want to know more about the Eco wit sensor that I've been talking about in this video please watch the video Linked In the description overall I really like the hardware quality and the local data this thing produces but I think the lock down on calibration is not a good methodology for a company to have I understand that they take your data and use that to calibrate all the other sensors so they don't want majorly skewed data if someone calibrated incorrectly but still it doesn't make you feel like you're owning your data I do think there are ways to adjust the sensor data within home assistant using math helpers or something like that so I may give that a try but I'm still pretty peeved although the Tempest clearly is a premium device I still think my favorite of the two is the Eco because you can actually control the calibration yourself and because it's significantly cheaper I'm going to be doing more reviews like this as well as some home assistant videos and some wed videos so if you're interested hit the Subscribe button and the bell to be notified when those videos come out if you want to support the channel you can always become a member give a super thanks or pick up one of my custom t-shirts in my shop anyway thanks for watching see [Music] you

Channel: Make It Work

Views: 15,255

Keywords: smart home, tech, home assistant, automation, diy, review, control, device, sensor, weather, weather data, local data, temperature, humidity, lightning, storm, tempest, ecowitt, wittboy, weatherflow

Id: j-plsW2GfPA

Length: 9min 49sec (589 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 19 2023