Dear WeatherCat station caregivers,
Recently, I noticed the batteries in my auxiliary temperature/humidity station were being consumed faster than in the past. The first instance was only about a week earlier than usual. However, a week later I once more got a warning on my console:
Yes I know that would appear to be my ISS transmitter, but I moved that to transmitter ID #2 and instead put the temperature/humidity station as ID: #1
Returning to our story, this definitely started to look like
da' dreaded ISS battery "eatin'" syndrome that I ran into a few years ago:
https://athena.trixology.com/index.php?topic=1434.0I never found a definitive explanation, but the one likely culprit was that I had spliced an extension to the temperature/humidity probe as can be seen in this photo:
It turns out these probes are very sensitive to splices and/or long cables. So it appeared to be time to replace the temperature humidity probe itself. I decided to use my economic stimulus and purchase a probe from
Scaled Instruments:https://www.scaledinstruments.com/shop/davis-instruments/parts/vantage-pro2-parts/temperature-and-humidity-sensor-parts/davis-7346-070-pro2-digital-temperature-humidity-sensor-sensiron-sht31/This newer part isn't exactly compatible with my older transmitter. However, it should have been easy to calibrate so the temperature would read correctly. Alas,
da' plot would eventually thicken.
As can be seen in the photo above, the temperature/humidity station was very dirty and neglected. Here is a close-up of the radiation shield:
The greyish color comes from the wildfire ash that had deposited on the components and was never removed because this location is protected from rains. Here is a photo of the radiation shield dismantled which shows the ash even better:
This photo also shows the protracted cable which I had spliced all the way back in 2010 (in my ignorance.)
The new probe screws into exactly the same mounting holes on the radiation shield plate:
Now all that was left to do is reassemble the radiation shield:
A reasonably obvious trick is to secure one screw in order to align the stack of plastic plates. That makes the subsequent installation simpler. At last I plugged the new probe into the old transmitter:
Finally, here is an overall view of the completed repair:
All that was left to do was to recalibrate my recievers to correct for the fact this sensor reads 0.9˚ F high. Thanks to the manual, this was simply done on my console. Alas, I use a
Weather Envoy to receive data for my Mac.
The only way to change settings on a Weather Envoy is to use WeatherLink software from Davis. As most of us Davis owners know, WeatherLink Mac is -
shall we say - a bit too minimalist in its functionality. For starters, I tried to launch my old copy of WeatherLink on my Mac mini only to see the usual error associated with launching it as a 64-bit application. When I tried to correct this - I couldn't! Already on Mojave, Apple had removed the option to launch in 32-bit mode!
Fortunately, I still have my old MacBook Pro that I use for adjusting the electronic fuel injection parameters on my trusty wagon. It is running macOS 10.9 (Mavericks.) It took some horsing around, but eventually I got WeatherLink Mac running there and connected to my Weather Envoy. When I finally could attempt to calibrate the probe -
I couldn't! Alas, WeatherLink Mac doesn't have the functionality to adjust anything more than the ISS external temperature probe and the Envoy internal temperature probe and barometric pressure. So after all that effort, I couldn't calibrate the probe as the data is fed into WeatherCat.
As it turns out, I don't really use the data for anything, so I'll just leave things as they are for now. However, if someone has a clever idea of how I can calibrate this probe on my Weather Envoy -
by all means do suggest!There is one last bit of the tale to be told. Once the new probe was installed, I left the battery that was accused of low-voltage. The console stubbornly insisted the battery was weak even after 24 hours, so I investigated. Under load the battery reported a somewhat low voltage of: 2.98. This is precisely the sort of bizarre behavior I observed during those dark days of the
"battery eatin' syndrome." I put a fresh battery which I checked was at 3.25 Volts. I hope that my problems are finally behind me but of course . . . . . only time will tell!!
Cheers, Edouard
![[cheers1]](https://athena.trixology.com/Smileys/default/food-smiley-004.gif "Cheers")
