Weather Station Hardware > Davis Instruments Weather Stations

Vantage Pro 2 suddenly losing data at around 5AM every day

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rhodesengr:
I have a weather station on the roof of a condo building in Punta Mita MX. Here is the data on Weather Underground
https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/IVALLE160
I installed it new in March 2022. So its been up there for a little over a year. I am normally in California and today I looked at the data for the first time in a while and it seems to be going off at or near 5AM everyday now and comes back sometime in the morning, often not until close to Noon.

My first thought was it needs new CR123A battery but I called Davis and they said those batteries should last longer than 1 year. The battery being bad does seem to fit the pattern but I am wondering why it takes so long to come back online once the sun is up.

The station is on the roof of Building 1 and connects wirelessly to the console which is located in the main office which is directly across from Building 1. There is good line-of-sight from the roof of the condo building down to the office building. The setup has worked fine except when power goes off because the we lose wifi. The data is uploaded with wifilogger. Below is a plot of the data from April. It was working fine until about April 23. I will be going down there in a about a week so I can trouble shoot further but I thought in the meantime, I would post this and see what others think. It's not WU because I also have the data going to Weather Cloud and PWS Weather. The console uses the wifi in the main office so there is no reason why that would go off at every day at 5AM. If they were turning off their wifi, they'd do that when they go home at 5PM. Any other ideas? When I am down there, I can see if the data is getting to the console in the early morning. If not, that pretty much indicates an ISS power problem. I am taking new batteries down but wondering what others here think.

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Mattk:
Simply a power/battery issue, stops ~ 5am after the capacitor has run down overnight, fires backup after the sun has put a bit of charge back in, typically indicates the CR123 battery is dead and not supporting the capacitor overnight. A 12 month system would not be expected to have a failed capacitance? Anyway first thing is to change the CR123 battery   

CW2274:
Doesn't the solar panel power the ISS tx while charging the supercap at the same time? The OP says things aren't normal sometimes til noon. Seems more afoot to me...

Mattk:
Yes there may or there may not be something more afoot and possibly a lowish capacitance and/or solar but it would be almost a certainty the CR123 battery is done and that would be the first thing to replace and to check the voltage of the old battery. A good CR123 will solely power an ISS for 8 months in total darkness or by spec at least 2 years depending on solar charge, so sight unseen it sounds like the ISS has been running maybe (?) more on the backup than from the capacitor since March 2022 (15 months) and again depending on the solar environment?

Some Vue ISS's require battery replacements around 6 months, some will run for years. In this VP2 instance I would replace the CR123 and see what life there is, in any case I would replace the battery every 12 months as regular maintenance.       

CW2274:
The battery is the last line of redundancy. If you're relying on that, the solar panel (#1 power supplier), and/or the supercap (#2 power supplier), have issues. It's not a battery problem.

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