Ws-2350 Or Ws-3650

[mintflavour]

Hi all

Looking to inversting in my first weather station. Budget up to £200. wireless and data logging is a must.

I see the WS-2350 for £115, but as Im really willing to spend upto £200, is the WS-3650 for approx £200 really worth the extra money, ie £80 worths of extra features. I hope some experienced users could give me some feed back.

If you know of any better Weather stations For £200 please feel free to post.

Any info much appreciated.

All the best

Mint

[nextenso]

Hi all

Looking to inversting in my first weather station. Budget up to £200. wireless and data logging is a must.

I see the WS-2350 for £115, but as Im really willing to spend upto £200, is the WS-3650 for approx £200 really worth the extra money, ie £80 worths of extra features. I hope some experienced users could give me some feed back.

If you know of any better Weather stations For £200 please feel free to post.

Any info much appreciated.

All the best

Mint

Hi, I have had a WS3-600 for 2 years, its the same as the 3650 except you have the cup type anemometer and slightly larger rain gauge. I have had no problems except last year i fitted the cup type anemometer, so, I guess mine is a 3650.

The HeavyWeather software is fine for routine use. As I want to add sensors, I will chnage to Ambient Weather or similar and use 1-Wire format for added sensors. As for LaCrosse, they are good, appalling support, 'years' to answer a query.

Regards Jonathan

[skifreak]

I have a WS3600 and a WS2350. The main difference is the touch screen and that the WS3600 displays indoor and outdoor temperature at the same time, where as on the WS2350 you have to toggle the display mode by pressing the display button. Both are pretty robust, the WS3600 has survived 2 winters halfway up CairnGorm and the WS2350 one winter, spring and summer at Loch Morlich by Glenmore at 1100ft. You can see a data feed from both at www.winterhighland.info/cairngorm (though the one on the mountain has developed a problem and is not currently reporting outside data, this is thought to be flat batteries. The wind speeds recorded by this station are not reported on-line as the anemometer is unduly sheltered by CairnGorm standards and the fact it's operating in wireless mode, the prime purpose of this station was to record temperature info).

It partly depends what you want to do with the weather station, but to get the anything like decent representation of wind speeds you need to wire the thermo-hygro sensor to the console. The difference is sampling every 120seconds to more frequent than 8 seconds. Even on a really wild night in Inverness when testing this setup I struggled to record a windspeed over 20mph, while wired in 20mph was recorded as max gust on a day with not much more than a breeze!

If I was buying an other of these stations it would be a WS2350 everytime and I have recently taken delivery of a second WS2350, which along with a second weather station will be going on CairnGorm in the autumn. A lower slope and middle slope weather station will replace the WS3600 at the mid-station with two separate feeds, one at 2300ft and the second at 2800ft.

My main reason for favouring the WS2300 is the open source linux based application suite 'open2300' which provides a variety of tools for a PC to interact with the weather station and it is far more flexible than the heavyweather software. Unlike weather display which requires heavyweather to run to collect the data, open2300 communicates directly with the station. There is a version open3600 for the WS3600, but it's not as well developed or complete and the WS23*0 series is much more common.

One issue with these particular models is that they have no real concept of mean and gust wind speeds, just point speeds. I am developing a PHP script atm to interface with open2300 to use the minmax scripts to automatically keep resetting the max wind speed counter, thus providing a gust speed for the last few minutes. It also uses the history function, max speed and min speed along with frequent sampling of the weather stations current wind speed to calculate a Mean Wind Speed. If I get this all working as hoped, I'd happily offer it to anyone who wants to play around with it.

Sorry, this has probably become an essay without answering your original question!