Well, I am at the one-year anniversary of getting my Ambient Weather WS-2000 station and I will have to say it has exceeded my expectations in every way. I will admit I am no expert like many others in this forum and my requirements are pretty simple. I didn't plan to have a weather cam (although my interest in that has piqued recently). I don't plan to have my own website or do any fancy analysis of the historical data. I wanted a weather station that would give me lots of reliable basic data, would be easy to set up and publish online so my neighbors could view it and wouldn't require constant tinkering and maintenance. I chose the basic WS-2000 configuration and have added 4 WH31E temp/humidity sensors and a WH31L lightning detector. I use one of the WH31E's in a consistently shady spot outdoors to make sure I am not getting temperature spikes on the main array which is mounted in full sun about 3' above a wood privacy fence. The other WH31E's monitor various zones inside my house. The WH31L is also mounted outdoors, housed in the same Acu-rite radiation shield with the shaded WH31E. All the outdoor sensors have Energizer lithium batteries, and the indoor sensors have standard alkaline batteries.
The initial install and setup was very simple and straight forward. Everything worked right out of the box as advertised. I did have a couple of newbie questions in configuring the console and contacted Ambient Weather support via email. They responded promptly on the same day the request was emailed. If I am remembering correctly, one of my questions was even answered on a weekend after 8 PM. That really impressed me. I have had no need to contact Ambient support since the initial setup. I have installed all the firmware and wifi firmware updates that have come out (none recently however) and had no problems with the updates. All the batteries still seem to be at full capacity after one year of use.
I publish online to AmbientWeather.net and Weather Underground. I don't do anything fancy, just a few simple alerts from AmbientWeather.net, which have all worked perfectly. I also have the Alexa and Google skills enabled and use them frequently. I have read about all the grief with WU, but to be honest I have had very few issues with it during my first year of use. My neighbors use WU to view my station and one of them has commented how he appreciates having that information available.
I have had to do very little "tinkering" during my first year. I did have to adjust the WS31L lightning detector settings after the first month of monitoring because I was getting occasional false positives with the default settings. I changed the switch settings to medium sensitivity and have been happy with the results since then. The only other tinkering I have done is a couple of minor recalibrations on the relative pressure which I assume is needed because of seasonal temperature changes.
The only maintenance I have done in my first year is to clean the rain funnel and tipping spoon twice. I have the bird spikes on the funnel and so far have had no problems with bird droppings. Last winter I sprayed the top surfaces with teflon spray to help prevent the snow and ice from sticking. I had no problems last winter with the solar panel getting covered or the wind cups/vane freezing up. I did cover the rain funnel during the winter months so it did not get snow or ice in the tipping spoon mechanism. I figured any rain readings I might get from snow/ice melt would be totally meaningless anyway, so I decided to just cover the funnel from late December until early March. I was satisfied with that decision and will probably do the same thing during the coming winter.
I put off buying a weather station for about 3 or 4 years because I wanted to wait and see how the Acu-rite Atlas Elite would pan out. In hindsight, that was a stupid decision on my part. I should have just bought an Ambient station and I would have had a couple more years of enjoyment from it. So, for whatever its worth to anyone reading this, after my first year of ownership you can count me as a satisfied Ambient Weather customer.
