Topic: Is my 3 month old WS-1001 dead already?

[Pooley]

Hi all,

Long time lurker but first time poster so please be gentle with me

I got myself a WS-1001 (HP-1001 over here in Australia http://ss-tradings.com.au/Solar-Powered-Wireless-Weather-Station-with-WiFi-Connection-P3086172.aspx last Christmas and for the first couple of months it was good. Had no problems registering with Wunderground (
http://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=ISOUTHAU196) and have been able to observe it quite happily since I have had it.

I originally registered with WXforum back when I had an anomaly occur on the 4th of March where at 11:38pm I had a very sudden spike in the outdoor temperature where it went from 18.2°C to 31.9°C in the space of 30 minutes:
http://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=ISOUTHAU196#history/s20150305/e20150305/mdaily

The day leading up to that night the maximum temperature had been 24.5° at about 3:30pm and had been steadily dropping since then http://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=ISOUTHAU196#history/s20150303/e20150303/mdaily. After the temp spike it then dropped fairly sharply before a steady rise for about an hour before a steady dropoff for for another hour and a half until settling down again at what I would consider the accurate temperature for that night of about 18°.

The nearest weatherstation to me (with identical hardware - about 2km away from me) had nothing like that - they maintained a steady temperature all night that night. Their station is down at the moment so I can't link to them unfortunately.

So I thought that I would see what happened over the next few days and nights but nothing really happened so I just put it down to a glitch in either the transmitter or receiver.
 
So, moving along to the start of this month and we had our first significant rainfall for the year (we went 61 days with no more than 1mm of precipitation on any of those days!!) and of course the rain gauge in the station decided to stop working (it stopped at 3.7mm when we had closer to 11mm according to our offical Bureau of Meteorology Weatherstation located about 5km away http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/dwo/IDCJDW5046.latest.shtml).. So I climbed up on the roof and took it down. Gently pulled it apart and sprayed a bit of lubrication on the hinges for the bucket and put it back together. Since then we have had trace amounts of rainfall and they have registered fine - in fact it is raining lightly here as I type now 

After putting it back up I noticed that the humidity and dew point readings seemed very low so I manually calibrated the base unit using a combination of readings from the nearby Government weather station as well as the other WU connected weather station that I mentioned before. this seemed to resolve that issue as well.

So today my unit seems to have had a major issue occur:

At 11:41 this morning the outside temperature and outside humidity measured by the unit shot up (11° in 1/2 an hour). It then went down 9° in 20 minutes. Then the humidity plummeted to 1% and has stayed there since. The part that measures the humidity is obviously not working as the other stations in the area have humidity at the moment as between 90%-99% due to the rain we are having. It has been overcast here all day so I don't think that sunlight was the issue.

Just wondering if anyone has seen anything like this and do you think that I should be arranging with the retailer that I purchased it from for an exchange?

[btcompute]

I think the issue may be with Weather Underground rather than your PWS.
There have been other reports of the same issue with WU.
Other forum users may be able to offer more info.

[Dr Obbins]

I have a WS-1000 and the console has historical graphs. Does your console have graphs also that can verify WU readings?

[Pooley]

Thankyou both for the replies.

I think the issue may be with Weather Underground rather than your PWS.
There have been other reports of the same issue with WU.
Other forum users may be able to offer more info.

I noticed on Wednesday that Wunderground was not showing the average and extremes for the day but that seemed to resolve itself by the next day.

I have a WS-1000 and the console has historical graphs. Does your console have graphs also that can verify WU readings?

Yes indeed, those readings are there and they confirm what Wunderground is reporting (apologies for the quality of the images - dodgy phone camera images):





And now Wunderground appears to have gone offline for me (Error 500 - Internal Server Error) 

[Eno]

If the data from the console shows those extreme swings and spikes, maybe you got a lemon. I have the same station just a couple months newer than yours and haven't had any issues like that. I've just seen a couple brief gaps in some on the pressure data.

Maybe you can get a warrenty replacement.

[Pooley]

And so on Friday the humidity sensor appears to have fixed itself up and now all readings are behaving as they should.

http://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=ISOUTHAU196#history/s20150417/e20150417/mdaily

If this happens again I will contact the retailer.

The joys of a cheap 'professional' weather station 

[Pooley]

Problem has cropped up again so I have contacted the supplier to enquire about repair/replacement:

[HaraldS]

What version of the firmware are you running? I see this entry for 2.2 at https://ambientweather.wikispaces.com/ws1001-wifi

Version 2.2.0
February 5, 2015

Changes:
1. Resets WiFi if internet connectivity is lots for 20 minutes.
2. Filters our spikes in temperature due to noise generated from the environment.

You will need to re-enter your Wunderground.com StationID and Password.

Check with support, since the US updates might set the wrong transmitter frequency killing connection to your sensor.

[maddgo87]

I have had the same problem with the RH sensor just dropping down to 1.