Weather Station & Integrations

Hardware
1

I’ve been looking into weather stations and Ambient & Tempest weather stations seem to have good reviews both in general and with the Home Assistant Community for integrating well with local only integrations.

However when I pulled up the Ambient Home Assistant Integration page I see mention of an entirely unrelated Ecowitt weather station & corresponding Home Assistant plugin.

So now I guess I’m curious why the Ecowitt is mentioned on the Ambient page but not the Weatherflow Tempest page. Is there something about Ambient that’s lacking, or Ecowitt that’s better (and is it Weather Station related or plugin related)?

Ecowitt seems to have FAR more users, listing in percent instead of total number: 7,365 (1.9%) vs 1706 for Ambient & 1378 for Tempest.

I also notice that Ambient uses a raw version number (“Home Assistant 0.85”) instead of one with a year.month format (Home Assistant 2022.9), which makes me think it was introduced much earlier.

All this is to say, I’m just trying to make sense of this and see how they all compare both weather station wise and Home Assistant wise. Also, since they’re measuring local weather, it’s very confusing to verify from reviews that the data is local and not going up to the cloud.

Also I just wanted to say that I appreciate that the Tempest plugin lists every metric it exposes.

2

I have 2 ecowitt’s. Looking at the actual hardware, Ambient and Ecowitt look very similar tech wise so they seem to be related at some level.
I can just buy a plant sensor or temp or PM sensor and turn it on, and it is in my Ecowitt and in Home Assistant. Never had a problem with it so far.
I have a temp sensor in my car so I know if I want to warm it up or not, and it registers at home and when at the vacation home, I see it there as well…

My install:

I also send data to weather underground and can see (actually my sister can see) the data there if I don’t want to look at HA. Rain sensors tell me to pull packages in if the door senses a person. I get local lightning warnings. The LUX turns on and off lighting in the house.