Weather station for use in Home Assistant

I am looking for a weatherstation at a reasonable price (around 200 Euros max). I found good reviews for the ecowitt wittboy. There is an HA integration but unfortunately it is a proprietary solution.

Is there no weather station for zwave or zigbee? MQTT would also be fancy.

(And no, I’ve read about a small python server offering MQTT capabilities for the wittboy. I am looking for MQTT out of the box.)

Thanks a lot in advance for all your input!

Cheers,
Ron

I just posted a comment about that a few minutes ago, so I just link to that post. :slight_smile:

I like the smaller one better, and it works with local tuya, so if you want and need to, you can avoid the tuya iot cloud. But that’s a bit tricky to configure, but it works. With the tuya cloud you are ready in no time! :slight_smile:

1 Like

I have an ecowitt, you can block it from accessing the internet and the integration in HA is all local…

1 Like

I think I will order the ecowitt. It looks very nice and all the reviews are great.

2 Likes

Looks like Popp Z-weather is available in both US and EU Z-wave frequencies for under 200 usd. Qubino seems to have discontinued theirs; maybe Shelly will revive it post-acquisition.

I had a Weatherflow Tempest for a while. It was expensive and inaccurate. The rain and wind sensors especially. Avoid.

2 Likes

I had issues with the rain that were fixed after I requested Weatherflow do their calibration process based off some nearby data I had available (there is an article in their help about it)

What’s the point of having a local weather station if it needs to be continually corrected by other sources?

You might as well just use a cloud weather service.

The sensor is not sensitive enough to record light drizzle (even if it goes on for days) yet at the same time way too sensitive to vibration. I initially had it on a hockey-stick TV antenna roof mount. Every time it rained or gusted slightly the vibrations from the roof would record monsoon level rainfalls. So I moved it to a wooden post in the yard and then no longer got accurate wind readings as well as the drizzle problem. :man_shrugging:

I don’t have access to the nearcast rain so I don’t know what the ongoing calibration is like, but the calibration that was done for my unit was a one-off. There are a couple of non-Tempest stations in my neighbourhood that allow me to make sure I’m not getting junk results and so far (a few years now) so good

I had conventional weather stations that use a tipping measure that did a poor job of picking up constant drizzle too, the Tempest for me hasn’t performed considerably differently from a conventional unit in that regard

Accuracy.

Maybe you’re used to nice, big, flat and predictable areas of geography where someone else’s readings match yours, but here’s there’s lots of valleys which steer the weather around depending on the direction of wind.

Go half a mile away and they could have had a dry day when you had full rain, and driving down in the valley the temperature swings around rapidly, especially on cold days with frost hollows, a good five degrees is fewer minutes.

Nobody else is going to provide me accurate weather but me.

Anybody with an Ecowitt Wittboy can tell me if the unit is able to alert when the first drop of rain hits the sensor dome? I need it for quick awning closing… Thanks.

You missed the point completely.

The Weatherflow Tempest local weather station does not qualify as accurate. That was the point.

Yep - fair enough.

1 Like

In your experience - that doesnt mean that others have experienced similar, as I outlined earlier in this thread I was able to resolve my accuracy issue with a one-off calibration

By relying on cloud services to calibrate it. So why not just use the cloud service?

At the time I bought mine there were no other units in my area - I had data from a conventional tipping rain gauge that Weatherflow used to apply calibration to my device. I don’t use their NearCast rain adjustments - it’s never worked locally

I use the local integration to get data from my Tempest and the rainfall numbers match the numbers that get reported in the Tempest app.

It’s also not uncommon to need to calibrate conventional tipping gauges either