Topic: Ambient Weather component degradation?

[JayW]

I'm considering my first weather station (apart from desktop systems). What instruments in the Ambient Weather Osprey system (including consoles) would be degraded enough over a period of a few years that partial replacement or repair would be a good idea?

Parts wear and/or become degraded over time. Would it be a good idea to replace ISS and console sensors every year? Every two years? Longer? Never? How hard is it to disassemble and clean or replace ISS or console parts or sensors? How about replacing the additional stand alone WH31/B temperature-humidity sensors you can add to the WS-2000? At under $10 it's certainly easy and cheap to do, if it's necessary.

In general, what's a good maintenance scheme? I'm primarily interested in repair of the ISS, not its entire replacement, but if that's part of the overall maintenance scheme, then sure, talk about that, too.

[Theo]

It depends a lot of things, generally put up the station and see what happens, as things degrade, they will become obvious.  Ambient Weather has great support and I bought my WS-2000 setup with confidence several weeks ago, thus far it has been great.

[davefr]

I can't give you a specific answer but other then batteries, I'd suspect the wind cup, wind vane and Sensirion sensor to be the first to go.  (all of which are easy/inexpensive to replace).

The entire outdoor sensor is affordable to replace so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

I think it's a good idea to remove your ISS once a year to clean and inspect.  (regardless of brand)

There are tons of reviews on Amazon based on systems with the Osprey sensor.  I don't see any data suggesting a short life.

[JayW]

I can't give you a specific answer but other then batteries, I'd suspect the wind cup, wind vane and Sensirion sensor to be the first to go.  (all of which are easy/inexpensive to replace).

The entire outdoor sensor is affordable to replace so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

I think it's a good idea to remove your ISS once a year to clean and inspect.  (regardless of brand)

There are tons of reviews on Amazon based on systems with the Osprey sensor.  I don't see any data suggesting a short life.

Thanks, both of you. I was particularly wondering about the humidity sensor, given that the Davis SHT-31 has acknowledged problems, but then I thought asking in general might be better.

[galfert]

I'd like to offer some corrections to some of the used terms in this thread. All weather station brands are basically following the same recipe. There is an indoor console to receive weather data from the outdoor multisensor device. But what each company calls each component differs. There are different names for the same part.

Outdoor multisensor device:
Davis calls it ISS (for Integrated Sensor Suite).
Ambient calls it outdoor array sensor or simply array sensor.

It is awkward to use the term ISS when talking about Ambient. It's like calling Apple's mobile software store the Play Store. No you would not do that because that is Google's name for their mobile software store.

Hate to be such a stickler but I felt like most people would appreciate learning this than much later finding out that they have been using the wrong term.