1 Month with the BloomSky Weather Station

I have been running the BloomSky Weather Station now for about a month, and I figure it is time to give it a longer term review.  

After moving it a few times, I settled on a spot in my landscaping.  I wanted to get a nice view of the sunset and so I had to find a good spot facing towards the West.

In order to keep the WiFi signal, you need to keep the unit relatively close to the house, or use a WiFi repeater to boost your signal.  Over the course of the month, I did not run into any connection issues, and the solar panels kept the batteries charged the entire time.  Although the station does not measure rain fall, it will alert  you via the app when it is raining.   I eventually turned that off, as it became annoying after a while. If you happen to live in a normally dry area,  I can see how it can be useful.

As far as temperature accuracy goes, at night or cloudy days, it was usually was within 1 or 2 degree's of my Davis Vantage Vue.  In direct sunlight on the warmer days, that increased to about 5 degree's.  Now the Davis is mounted on a 7 Foot pole with grass under it, so the height difference and location may also account for the higher reading.  Humidity and the Pressure readings have been very close also.  The real test is going to be during a humid 95 degree day in July.

You can also now register the station to report to wunderground.  I registed mine so I could compare my Davis (KNJWASHI4) to the BloomSky (KNJWASHI26).

The real reason to acquire one of these is for the camera.  The image on the right is the final image it took for the day and it does a very nice job in low light.  I have been very happy with the quality of the camera so far.

There is no way to access the unit directly.  The system stays off online, connecting once every 10-15 minutes to send the weather data and upload the latest image, then it disconnects.  I am a little uneasy about not being able to access the unit, for the simple reason is that you are dependent on BloomSky's infrastructure and if something ever happens to them, you will not be able to use the unit.

Even with no direct access to there unit, there are still many things you can do with it.  The guys at wxforum.net came up with some scripts to add the BloomSky photo's, time lapses and weather data to your website, and there is a whole channel on ifttt.com that has pre-defined recipes.  I currently use that to send each day's time lapse video to my Dropbox.  You can also run Weather Display and get the data from wunderground and create some of your own graphs.

Conclusion
This is one of those products that really is in a class of its own.  I don't consider it be a replacement for your Davis or other higher end weather station, but to compliment it.  I have 2 other web camera's setup and neither one can capture the sky like the BloomSky.  Even in direct sun, the pictures still come out very good.   If you are just interested in basic temperature and don't care about rain amounts or wind, this would be a nice step up from a basic remote thermometer.  The small foot print would also work well for condo or apartment dwellers.  I am looking forward to seeing what it captures during some of our summer thunderstorms.

You can see my BloomSky camera and other weather data on my website http://www.warrenskywarn.org.