How do these hold up in regions with regular snowfalls during the winter? I live in a region where we have really harsh winters (some days can be -40/50F and snow is not uncommon). I see they have a heater, but is that still valid for the new VP2 series and is there any way to power it via Solar?
How do these hold up if it hails/sleets?
With the Davis series, it seems like they are incredibly proprietary and they force you into using this weatherlink.com website. I have two concerns with this:
By forcing the data directly to weatherlink.com, doesn't that add latency in terms of publishing to CWOP and Wunderground?
If Davis decides to deprecate weatherlink.com, am I essentially stuck with just the console and would have no flexibility in being able to publish directly to CWOP/Wunderground?
No problem with snow here in northern Michigan, near the "tip of the mitt". I have a homespun version of the gauge heater in my Davis. (as you noted, that this requires the old conical shaped funnel and not the new AeroCone). It seems that you get the old style cone with the Davis gauge heater. I already had it since my Davis is several years old.
The heater resistor is 25W, so it might be feasible to construct a solar power system with a sufficiently large panel and battery. I don't know if anyone has tried this, but I have pondered this as well. I power my heater out of a transformer located in the garage with buried low voltage lighting wire. (Malibu-type)
We have not seen anything like -40°F though, we do get a lot of snow and some below zero temps.
Small hail (¼ inch) hasn't caused any problem, but we haven't received any really big stuff here. Above some arbitrarily large size of hail, I don't know if
anything can survive. We had sleet all day this past winter. The heater melted it, but a nearby Davis seems to have survived since it is presently recording rain again this spring.
As mentioned by others, the meteobridge is quite capable of uploading to a number of weather sites/services as well as your own web hosting via FTP. I do this myself. I previously used the original meteobridge, but now I use a Pro Red (with receiver) for this. Other programs are available it you can run a dedicated PC 24/7.
Greg H.