My dog hates rain!

April 24, 2021 5:56 AM

Is there a device I can stick in my yard that will notify me when it's stopped raining?

I know there's a well-tested one called a "window," but it won't work for my purposes, because my windows aren't located near where I hang out in the house. I'd have to constantly get up and check, because if there's a five-minute break in the rain at some point (e.g. while I'm distracted, watching TV), I want to know about it.

The problem I'm trying to solve is a dog that hates rain. I'm working on some training to help him get over it, but in the meantime, the risk is he'll get so backed up, he'll eventually poo and pee on the floor. If the rain pauses for even a few minutes, I want to get him outside.

What I'm imaging is a device I can stick in the ground. It will have a sensor that detects raindrops hitting it. When drops fall below some low threshold per minute, it will ping my phone.

I've searched for rain detectors, but all the ones I've found are for people who want to know how many inches of rain have fallen, not whether or not the rain has stopped.

posted by grumblebee to Pets & Animals (6 answers total)

Best answer: What about something like the Dark Sky app? I have found it to be very accurate at predicting the onset and cessation of weather conditions down to the microlocal scale, and it generates alerts based on your settings (possible issue: iOS only).
posted by slkinsey at 6:18 AM on April 24, 2021 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: That's really cool. I just downloaded it and will test it. It's raining all day here, so I should know if it works before too long.
posted by grumblebee at 6:26 AM on April 24, 2021

This company produces optical rain sensors with an "it's raining" feature. I have no idea, personally, how one would actually set it up to do what you need, but it seems doable in principle?
posted by wreckingball at 8:51 AM on April 24, 2021

Do you have somewhere you could hang a chain of rain bells/rain chimes, and would you notice when they stopped pinging?
posted by daisyace at 3:53 PM on April 24, 2021

I look for patterns of raindrops in puddles. For your backyard, maybe a large shallow dish or pie-plate.
posted by ovvl at 4:25 PM on April 24, 2021

You could do this with a SmartThings hub and a Samsung moisture sensor mounted on a stick or somehow raised off the ground so that residual moisture on the ground didn't create false alerts. Once you got the physical installation figured out, it would be trivial to setup to alerts that told you when moisture is not detected for a pre-defined amount of minutes.

Note Samsung is discontinuing its hardware so may be hard to find some of the products new through common retail channels (check ebay for used). Probably similar solutions would be available through other smarthome platforms if the Samsung gear is too hard to find.
posted by jameslavelle3 at 10:12 AM on April 25, 2021