All other sensors are working and talking to the consoles. Yesterday, we had a pretty hard rain for about 1/2 hour. I estimated 1/3 to 1/2 inch. When I looked at the console, it read .01 inch. I checked a station about a mile from here and he got .31. I manually tipped my cups 30 times to try to stay fairly accurate. The station only recorded .02. I finally tipped it enough to get .24, but it took way more than 24 tips. Does that sound like a reed problem?
(on a side note, Davis's website seems to be non-existent right now, at least for me)
Hi Mike, yes, it's possible for the reed switch to go bad, they are
VERY fragile devices and can break at the least effort. They can be a pain to replace, but it's a doable fix. You can get the reeds from Davis, it's in their parts list, or call them, you should order several since they tend to not cooperate and not all of them work out of the box. Be very careful with their alignment, the switch works best if the parts are parallel to the base of the rain gauge. Once you get the new one installed it's best to carefully bend one of the wires up at a 90? angle so that you can turn it if you need to, take an ohm meter to it and make sure it's normally open (do this before you start, saves time), tip the mechanism a few times and see if the meter registers the switch. If necessary twist the switch a little bit to give you optimum performance, once set you might tack it down with a little gorilla glue across each lead, and verify that nothing shifted when you did this, after that, solder the leads to your sensor wires and you should be all set.
I've had to repair a dozen or so of these in the last year and they have all had bad switches in them, a real pain till you get used to fixing them. The switches usually fail due to either the capsule breaking or the contacts burning out.
Good luck
Doc