Wireless Weather Station

A useful thing for beekeepers to know is the weather -specifically the weather near the bee hives. You can generally tell a lot about the weather by looking out of the window -or in the case of snow looking at your Facebook news feed and seeing umpteen people have posted "It's snowing" "Yay snow!" "Gonna write my name in yellow!" and so on. However the actual air temperature and humidity level you probably can't tell from looking. Given that everyone and his dog seems to have a smartphone these days a lot of people have access to a current weather report at their finger tips, however unless the service you're using has weather monitoring station located slap bang in the middle of your apiary there's a good chance the conditions reported won't be quite the same as conditions where your bees are. For example in Hull some bright spark thought it would be a great idea to place a weather station on the dock, it's more exposed than most of the city and it's near a large body of  water so tends to give temperature readings a little lower than the rest of the city.

My bees are located in my garden and as I don't have a vast sprawling estate (yet) I can use an off the shelf Wireless Weather Station. Basically a remote temperature and humidity sensor which transmits on a radio frequency to a base station located in your home. They generally have ranges of a few tens of metres so should be just right for the garden. There's a lot of different models to choose from and if anyone wants to do their research I'm sure there's reports and reviews of most of them n the web. I didn't tho. Today whilst in Tesco I noticed they had on reduced from £20 to £15 and on an impulse decided to get one. The one their selling 'Exclusively from Tesco' is the Technika WS 2121P Inverness Weatherstation. Who are Technika? Seems to be a subsidiary of Tesco. I own a Technika digital camera actually, it's pretty crap to be honest and I gave up on it after a couple of days. Anyway on a whim I picked up one of their Weather Stations.

Technika Weather Station -complete with fake security tag

Notice the box has a big sticker on it saying Security Protected? Well it isn't really. I paid for mine at the self service bit and wandered out without getting any security tag deactivated. Examining the box I found there's no device in the box or behind the sticker to activate a sensor. Maybe someone's realised that a sticker saying "Security Protected" is cheaper than an actual acoustomagnetic strip or RF tag and about as effective. I don't imagine many shoplifters go back to return their loot when those door sensors start beeping as they exit.

Anyway back to the Weather Station. It's made in China. I think it's a little disingenuous having Inverness printed on all six sides of the packaging and China on one, perhaps calling the device Zhenjiang or Nantong would been more appropriate.

I popped in some batteries -not included, but also sold in Tesco, I didn't buy mine there tho. Two AA size in the base station and two AAA in the remote. I noted the base station was showing a remote temperature and humidity reading and so set the time and date. Great. My plan was to pop the remote under one of the hives so I could see the air temperature the bees are dealing with at any given time. However I noticed that the temperature on the remote wasn't the same as that being displayed for it on the on the base station, they were both indoors but the reading I was seeing was obviously from outside. I figured Tesco are probably selling a lot of these units, they have a range of 30m so there's a good chance it's picking up someone else's remote. That was exactly what was happening. It didn't occur to me till later that my own should've been a stronger signal as it was nearest the base station anyhow. To avoid reading the wrong remote the devices support three frequencies so it's not a huge problem. I switched to the second frequency but got nothing, I tried the third frequency, still got nothing. Either my remote wasn't transmitting or my base unit wasn't receiving. I suspect the problem may have been the remote given that I was able to read somebody else's on the base unit using channel 1.

There's two things wrong with this picture.

As you can see from the picture above despite being right next to the remote the base station isn't getting a reading from it -if it was it'd be in the bottom left of the display. Having spent many years working in Information Technology I'm actually aware of a procedure that can be applied to computers and a vast array of electronic devices to remedy a range of problems. In I.T. we call it 'power cycling.' However it doesn't involve actual bikes or much by way of effort. Power Cycling a device just means turning it off and on again. And more often than not it works. If you've ever watched The IT Crowd Chris O'Dowd's character Roy answers the phone with "Hello, I.T. Have you tried turning it off and on again." If you haven't watched The IT Crowd then I suggest you do. Anyway pulling the batteries out of the base unit and remote sensor and reinstalling them worked for me :). Yay for turning stuff off and on again.

The more eagle eyed readers out there might have spotted that in the picture above the remote thinks it's 19.3 degrees C whilst the base station thinks it's 20.2 degrees. That's a discrepancy of almost a whole degree. Guess Technika aren't going to much trouble to calibrate their devices before shipping. Not a huge surprise really as it's a cheap unit at fifteen beer tokens, there's other units with similar functionality out there going for just shy of four hundred quid.

When two parties can't reach an agreement the obvious thing to do is get a third party's input. So I did. I dug out another digital thermometer I had knocking about and put it with the base station and the remote. I figured it would probably agree with whichever was correct.

There's no agreement here.

It was a good idea but a flawed one. I have no real idea how accurate my digital thermometer is, chances are it's about as roughly calibrated as both the remote and the base station, could even have come from the same factory for all I know. The thermometer read 18.5, the remote 18.8 and the base station 19.1. So I decided to average the readings to hopefully get something more accurate.

(18.5 +18.8+19.1)/3=18.8

Turns out the average of the three readings was actually the same as the reading from the remote, Good enough for me! I don't really need to know  the exact air temperature in my house. After all if it's warm I''m warm, if it's cold I'm not, don't need a digital display to tell me. The remote has to be kept out of drafts, rain and water so I've sat it on a brick under Hive1.

Under Hive1. Needs a sweep actually.

So now thanks to the wonders of wireless technology I can tell if it's cold or not outside without having to venture out into the snow myself.