Weather Station Hardware > Davis Instruments Weather Stations

FARS fan frozen

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capeweather:
For any of you who have the FARS I would recommend checking the fan to see if it's still rotating during daylight hours. I went out there today and could not hear the normal humm from the fan so I decided to take it apart and check to see if it was ok. Sure enough it was as stiff as rigormortis. So I called Davis and they are sending me a replacement fan.  :D Anyhow I decided to tinker with it and with a little WD40 and a couple of manual spins it was good to go again. Might be worth a look if you haven't checked it or heard it in a long time.

tweatherman1:
I've got a solar powered one that need to have the batteries replaced. I can hardly not wait to take it apart again.

Tim

xmas111:
I too use to dread the thought of replacing the batteries in my solar powered fan so I decided to mount the batteries in an external case. Now it's a piece of cake to do!

Here you can see the external case for the batteries in the first pic:
http://johnsweather.com/weather_station_equipment.html

it's not a clear pic, sorry about that.

Mark / Ohio:

--- Quote from: "xmas111" ---....Here you can see the external case for the batteries in the first pic:
http://johnsweather.com/weather_station_equipment.html

it's not a clear pic, sorry about that.
--- End quote ---


Boy I'm jealous of that computer setup you have there.  Nice!!   8)

I don't have the FARS myself so I don't know exactly what the fan looks like.  But assuming it is similar to a muffin fan, an engineer told me once that synthetic motor oil was a good choice for lubrication on small motors.  Said the syn will not degrade like the standard oil.  I replaced a noisy cpu fan a couple years ago.  Within what seemed like only a few months the new fan was chattering so being this is a 7 year old 466MHz computer anyway with the days of remaining life dwindling down, I used some syn on the 5 year old fan I'd replaced and stuck it back in.  Been running quiet 24/7 for the better part of 2 years now.  (Knocking on wood.:lol:)

capeweather:
My fan is actually powered by the sun so I don't think I would need a battery. If you put a volt meter on the output of the solar cell you should get anywhere between 0-3V DC depending on the intensity of the sun. 3V meaning it's very sunny and 0V meaning extreme overcast conditions or no sunlight. Are you referring to the 24 hour FARS powered by battery? I'm a little confused. At first I was a little concerned because when I noticed the fan was seized up I was curious if this was going to affect the output voltage of the solar cells. According to Davis it should not affect it and sure enough I was getting a strong output voltage after pointing the cells directly at the sun. I'm hoping tomorrow when I check the fan that it's operating ok. The bearing on the fan seems to be lubricated enough to allow movement without any restrictions. By the way John, that's a nice setup you have there.  :D

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