Tempest Rarely Detects Rain

[Laurel-Highlands]

I am having a unique problem with my Tempest. I will also mention, this is a “replacement” tempest. The first one’s sensors all went dead inside of a month of ownership.

Ok, so I live at the top of a mountain. We get a lot of wild weather phenomena. Especially rain associated with lots of fog. It’s drizzling right now. And it’s foggy. Yet my $300 tempest is reporting no rain at all. For the entire day.

Anyone know why this is happening. I’m getting pretty tweaked out with this stupid thing. Since I’ve owned it. It has had a total sensor failure. Now it never detects rain. What gives?

Voltage is 2.58

Station ID 30167

[eric]

Drizzle is not easy to get. Remember the sensor is pretty sensitive and needs quite some filtering or you would get a lot of false rain events. The trick is to find the balance between what you could state as ‘noise’ and what is genuine rain. Drizzle is producing hardly any impacts on the dome. Was there a real rain event today or just falling mist all day ??? Also do you have a manual gauge maybe?
If you have you can help via this report and it will help fine tune your Tempest quicker.

A meteorologist just told me for your location : nws says less than 0.01 inches of rain today. Any rain measuring device will have a hard time to measure that.

SKY/Tempest vs. co-located rain gauge” reporting,

Hi folks. In an effort to bring a little structure to the process of collecting and acting on your “SKY/Tempest vs. co-located rain gauge” reporting, we’ve created two Google forms: use this one to Register your Co-located Rain Gauge (just once) and this one to Report your Co-located Accumulation Data (for each event) Please feel free to register your gauges and start submitting accumulation data through these forms. We’ve also set up a special email address where you can send photos and anyt…

A meteorologist just told me for your location : nws says less than 0.01 inches of rain today. Any rain measuring device will have a hard time to measure that.

PS : next real rain event, give a shout and we’ll have a closer look, at this moment not much to diagnose as all seems very calm. Thanks

[Laurel-Highlands]

Hi Eric,

Nope I’m afraid today we have not had a “real” rain event. But this seems to be my issue on this mountain. The majority of the rain events we have start as drizzle then intensify. I’ve seen the tempest report nothing at all during drizzle then as the rain intensified, report nothing at all throughout the entire event.

It’s an odd problem to have. It seems like the tempest cannot smoothly transition between a drizzle fog event turning into a rain event very well, if at all…

Any suggestions?

I don’t have a true rain gauge here. I may end up getting one if the tempest can’t pick up the rain measurements.

[gizmoev]

@Laurel-Highlands

It seems like the tempest cannot smoothly transition between a drizzle fog event turning into a rain event very well, if at all…

When the rain intensifies can you go tap the Tempest mount to “jump-start” it? I have had a SKY do that in the past where it wouldn’t record anything until I tapped it and then it started recording normally again.