Dear WeatherCat station caregivers,
WeatherCat dutifully sends me the reminder email to service my weather station on October 2nd. I've been trying to complete this servicing since then. The Weather Envoy battery fiasco was part of this effort. Today, I finally got around to servicing the temperature humidity probe. Since I replaced the PC case fan last spring I wasn't sure how much debris the new fan was bringing into the radiation shield and onto the sensor itself. So felt it was necessary to take the assembly apart to be sure all was well. I decided to just unplug the cable and let WeatherCat rack up the sensor errors. Here is what the assembly looked like just off the bracket:
Not very dirty at all really. Here is the upper part of the assembly where the fan is located:
Some dead insects and spider webs but nothing seriously obstructing the air flow. I decided to use one of those compressed gas dusters to remove the bulk and settle at that. Winter is coming, there is no point in cleaning beyond what will get dirty again in a hurry. Finally here is the original Davis radiation shield disassembled:
It comes together with the components from the top of the photo and ending up with the final solid plate at the bottom of the photo. My sensor isn't in the normal position that would have come from Davis because the fan required the sensor to be relocated (according to Davis at any rate.)
I need to buff the wax off of the collector cone and apply Rain-X to the interior surface of the cone. Then at last my station will be fully serviced for Winter. These days, I guess I can't complain about it taking 2 weeks!
I hope everyone else in the Northern Hemisphere has done their maintenance for Winter. If not, time is definitely of the essence!
Cheers, Edouard
P.S. I had a surprise when I checked WeatherCat after reconnecting the temperature humidity probe. It claimed the temperature had jumped 10 degrees from where it was when I started the servicing. Here is a graph with the anomaly:
As you can tell from the photos, the sensor spent a bit of time in the sun while I was servicing the assembly. That was enough to cause the apparent increase in temperature. As you can see from the graph, the fan made quick work of getting the sensor back to the correct air temperature.