What's the Nest of weather stations?

November 9, 2012 6:49 AM

I'm looking for the Nest of weather stations. Slick UI, lots of functionality, net connected, and iOS friendly.

I'm a weather dork. I've bought more weather apps on the app store than any sane person, and I talk about the weather constantly. My mom is the same way, and I inherited the interest from her. This year, I'd love to get her a great personal weather station for Christmas.

I don't have a lot of experience with weather stations, so I don't really know what's out there. I've tried to do some research, but the array of products available is fairly baffling, and I don't really know what sorts of things I should be looking for.

The features I know I want are:

• Monitor outdoor weather and transmit the data wirelessly
• Data is synced to either a Mac app or (preferably) an iPad/iPhone
• Price point around $150 but that's flexible

I've found the Netatmo, but would like to find something a little more focused on weather (it lacks wind-speed and precipitation monitors) and less focused on air quality and noise. If I could swap out its sensors, it would be perfect. There's plenty of non-net-connected weather stations that do that monitoring, but from my googling it looks like most of them require hooking up to a PC with a wire to generate graphs.

So, what's your favorite weather station? What features should I be looking for?

posted by duien to Shopping (6 answers total)

I'm hoping you get a direct answer because I'd like to see it too. But as a resource for research, have you looked at Wunderground's personal weather station page? Their wiki page has useful links, too.
posted by Nelson at 8:06 AM on November 9, 2012

sadly, you can't even get a throwaway anemometer for 150 bucks. WeatherHawk are made by a company that makes real meteorological equipment, but they are nowhere near your price
posted by scruss at 11:53 AM on November 9, 2012

What about a product from AcuRite?

I have no experience with their product but they seem to be in your price range and do what you want.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 2:15 PM on November 9, 2012

I don't have a personal station, but several of my co-workers do. The Davis brand seems to be popular with off duty meteorologists. If "flexible" stretches to over twice your price point, the Vantage Vue seems like a decent option. Scruss is correct, weather stations are expensive.
posted by weathergal at 11:08 PM on November 9, 2012

Have a look for fine offset WH1080/WH1081 - seen them for sale in UK, Aus, NZ but don't know about US, but seems to be a fairly widespread wireless weather station.

I picked one up for £60 (maybe $100). It connects via wireless to home unit that is connected to my pc via usb. Apparently there is mac software available as well
posted by xla76 at 1:12 AM on November 10, 2012

Response by poster: Thanks for the recommendations. Something that has to be plugged in the get the data is pretty much a deal-killer, so I went ahead and ordered the Netatmo. Also, my mom tweeted about it, so I'm pretty sure she'll like it :)
posted by duien at 11:25 AM on December 10, 2012