Or at least my new outdoor weather station is. Carrier’s new Better And Cooler Higher Tech app doesn’t show the temperature outside that the compressor unit is reading anymore, it just gives you the local weather report temperature. Mornings while just waking up and getting dressed for your day, you come to appreciate not having to go downstairs to check the outside temperature when living in a narrow mostly vertical city rowhouse. I wrote Carrier asking why they took that feature out of their new Better And Cooler Higher Tech app but of course they don’t care. So I decided to try another WiFi enabled outdoor weather station. My first attempt at that failed due to a lot of WiFi interference from my neighbor’s WiFi signals. That’s life in a tightly packed city rowhouse neighborhood. 

The new unit is also internet enabled, and can send data to the Weather Underground site. They say the have currently over 250,000 participating individual weather stations in their network. Given Musk and Trump gutting NOAA this is a good thing to have, though admittedly a weak substitute for things like daily weather balloons and super computer weather models. But every little bit can help. So I signed up and did the configuration routine to get mine onto their network.

Basically you create an account, connect your weather station to your household network, logon to your Weather Underground account, tell them about your weather station (model, location, height above the ground…), they give you an ID and key to plug into your station’s indoor monitor, and it begins automatically sending data to them. There is also a smartphone app you can use to view your weather station’s current data. 

So far, so good. I’ll have to monitor it for WiFi interference, but this new weather station has three channels I can set and maybe find one that’s clear, or clear enough from interference.