I live near the 59th parallel which in the best of conditions offers fairly low sunlight angles and short days. However for me it is worse than just that. I live on the north side of a hill with tall trees to the south and the weather is usually very overcast this time of year, and even when there is blue skies the light is barely getting to 20 watts per square meter. There is no direct sun to the station for nearly 2 months. I have noticed now that the WS 1400 IP is not rapid firing and often when I open the dashboard it will say the last time the station reported was anywhere from one minute to as much as 20 minutes ago. It still seems to be recording data every 5 minutes because things like wind speed does change on the table so I am guessing it is conserving what limited power it is getting from daylight to transmit its buffer only a couple times per hour. Is this what is happening? I have only had this station since mid Feb 2015 so have not gone through a full winter with it yet. I knew solar power was going to be an issue and thought maybe I would get an additional set of rechargeable alkaline batteries and swap them out once in a while. I am sort of dreading going out there in the snow and wind with a ladder and taking the station off the pole and putting new batteries in it.
Another thing I am considering is putting regular non rechargeable batteries in and putting some tape over the solar panel and see if I can get the station to operate until the direct sun returns sometime in late January. My thought for this approach is non rechargeable AAA batteries should last longer than the rechargeable ones. Any thoughts on this? Anyone else operating a weather station on low light conditions? Is 20 watts per meter for 3 hours a day enough?
