Know your weather seems to be the name of the game. That's what home weather stations are all about. You sit inside and a display console shows you what the weather is like outside - the humidity, the temperature, the rainfall, air pressure, wind speed, whatever. The more the number of sensors used outside to record this data, the more expensive will be the home weather station. The price actually depends on how complex it is. You could get a simple temperature model for less than $30 and it could go up to $600 for a really good set. Obviously the higher end models would be more reliable.



Are they difficult to set up? Hardly. All you will probably need to do is drill a few holes and screw on a few wires or cables. First, you need to know where you are going to put the sensors and the receiver. Once you've sorted that out, it's just a matter of fixing them in place. Earlier, there were a lot of cables that had to be fixed but now, a lot of the information is transmitted through radio, even beyond 300 feet, so that eliminates the need for wires. That means no holes though your walls or roof.

What exactly do you get from your home weather station? Just the data about the weather conditions outside? Well, actually, it calculates the dew point, the relative humidity, the wind chill factor and the heat index, depending of course what sensors you've chosen to install. A lot of them do a kind of a basic forecasting based on the data that is collected and they can be right 75% of the time. Besides which, they also have alarms which can be set to warn of high speed winds and critical temperatures - whether high or low. At a very basic level, it can also double up as an alarm clock and wake you up every morning, with readings of the temperature outside, not your breakfast in bed!

The great thing is the fact that it can also be connected to a computer. So your home weather station can be linked up with your heating and water sprinkling systems. So they do not have to run on timers - they can be programmed to come on when it is a certain temperature or when the humidity has reached a certain level or maybe even when the soil needs water, not otherwise.

Home weather stations can be used in so many ways. The fact that you are always kept informed about the weather helps. You can also check the temperatures and humidity levels in your child's room, you can check the soil to see if it's fine to start planting, you can check on the rainfall, the snowfall, the wind and the sun. No, you might not think it's an absolute necessity but it's a nice addition to any home. Most of the time, it would probably just be a recorder of the weather but it could also serve to give you a warning just in case there is some approaching calamity.