Love this forum, BTW...it's one of the reasons i went with Davis.
My Vantage Vue has a dead battery; I haven't gotten around to replacing it (my Vue is mounted thirty or so feet from the ground so it takes a bit of effort to get it up/down) and was searching around to find alternates for the battery. My Vue stops broadcasting around 4:00 am and doesn't start back up again until it gets some decent sun. I have power available that I could route to the unit; I've read about users who have hacked their unit to take power from a wall wart instead of relying on solar. That's more hacking then I'm comfortable with. Another solution I've seen is finding a dummy battery that runs off of a wall wart and that seems more in my comfort zone but I haven't found a dummy battery of the correct size. Then I thought of a really potentially dumb idea: can I just add a spotlight to my setup that comes on at night and shines on the solar panel to keep the unit charged overnight? That would be pretty easy for me to do; I could mount it on the same pole the suite is mounted on and have it shine directly on the panel. I could even have it come on just for the minimum time needed to bridge the gap where it goes dead. Then i wouldn't have to worry about batteries at all or even an aging super-cap.
Would that work? Or am I missing something fundamentally wrong with the idea?
thanks in advance
michael
