Ambient Weather WS-5050 Ultrasonic Smart Weather Station

What I really like about this weather station is how modern it is, my last one had the wind cups rip off in a strong winter storm. It connects up super simple and the display has various light settings. This weather station has everything you want in a weather station.

Wow I LOVE this Ambient Weather WS-5000. Don’t waste your time on lousy competitor models!I had an AcuRite Atlas for a couple years, but I got tired of constantly losing the historical weather trends every time we had a brief power outage. The AcuRite has a major design flaw by not having any kind of time sync (no Internet NTP or even radio time sync) the AcuRite Atlas resets the clock back to factory default time, and then all the weather data is messed up.While the AcuRite Atlas takes less time to install (it is all one piece unit, no assembly needed), this WS-5000 blows it away as far as the careful thought that Ambient Weather put into the display and presentation of information. For example, the AcuRite Atlas shows 48 hour rainfall on the display. Why not 24 hour? The WS-5000 has all the info laid out in a way that I can see the useful stats at a glance, very intuitive and in a beautiful presentation. The AcuRite display is also very pretty looking, but I can tell that the Ambient Weather WS-5000 display was designed by weather gurus who probably debated each icon for many weeks before deciding how to show it on the screen.But perhaps what I love the most about the WS-5000 is to be able to show the swimming pool temperature on the display using the optional WH31P waterproof thermometer probe sensor. It’s nice to have the pool temp always shown right next to the weather station stats, because this has the ability to set the extra info display onto a single sensor, in addition to the choice of cycling between sensors.It’s also very cool to be able to use the optional soil moisture and air particulate sensors with this.The Ambient Weather iPhone app features are better than the AcuRite app. The historical data charts are super useful, and I can use this with more home automation features like IFTTT. The WS-5000 can tie in with Wunderground hyper local weather, which is fun to contribute to, and to see other people’s weather station info in the neighborhood and how the microclimate varies.While I am super excited about the WS-5000 so far, this product is not perfect. If the manufacturer is reading this, I hope they can address some things in the next design. The instruction manual is terrible, and so is the user interface for the display buttons. It is not intuitive which buttons to press and what they do to navigate the various display menus. These buttons should be scrapped and go with a touchscreen design next time. It would be better to have a wall mount bracket to make it easier to line up and level to mount on the wall rather than two screw hanger notches on the back (which are always tricky to mark and line up on the wall). Also, I had to to a factory reset before it would recognize the main sensors, and wasted time being puzzled why it wasn’t working straight out of the box. Finally another minor improvement would be to not show the humidity circle on the display if a sensor does not have the humidity feature. I have to look at a blank humidity circle all the time for my pool temp sensor. It’s very minor, but would be more beautiful and less cluttered without this inactive item on the screen.Overall, I highly recommend this weather station! I think this may very well be the best one for residential use on the market at any price (the more expensive pro models from other brands have extremely antiquated info displays).

I've owned weather stationfor about 40 years and thisis the best one so far. I really wanted the ultrasonic wind sensor and when the prices came down I went for it. Ultrasonic sensors respond much faster than the cup based sensor which have to average the number of rotations in order to colculate the speed. The dosplay is attractive, but there is so much information on it, it is hard to read from across the room. There are no sensors in the display so it can be placed in part of the house with out sunlight interfeering with the temperature. The indoor temperature/humidity sensor is a separate small unit that can be placed out of sunlight.Negative: They say it has a range of 1000' and pretty much guarantee 300'. Mike struggles at about 250'. My house is wood andnot metal so that is not the problem. The lightning detector seems to detect lightning when there is none. I may be able to make it less sensitive. The instructdions don't say how far away it will detect. The rain guage seems to be sine, but it has not really rained here since I set it up. It is a good thing they separated the rain guage from the wind sensor assemby. Meteorologist recommend rain guages to be place abouit 4' off the ground. Many other weath "suites" have the guage attached so if yoiu place your winde sensor at 20", it makes your rainguage out of norm. Similarly if you place your wind sensor on a tripod off the ground, you will get a lower wind speed. At this time I don't thing there is a better weatehr station for homeowners than thiis. They also seem to have good customer service. Other companies were poor.

Initial set up is a bit tedious but much easier than my previous Davis Weather Station. The controller is well designed and easy to use. It has a number of add on accessories like soil temperature, lightning detection, air quality, water leak detectors (for wash room or utility room) etc. It has a good range for connections up to 1,000 feet. I have my station about 250 feet from the house and it works fine but your WIFi connection may be a factor for lower performance. You need to put your wind detector in an area free of obstructions to get accurate 360 degree detection of wind speeds and the higher location the better. eg chimney or above a roof line. The web software is easy to use and a good design. Very handy if you want to keep an eye on what's happening when you're away. It has a camera option as well although I don't have this as I have blink cameras. The bird spikes for the rain collector are not worth buying. They are very difficult to attache and you endue using something kludgy to glue it on. I had my son print one that simply attaches to the ridge of the collector which works perfectly. They could do the same thing or better yet incorporate it in the design to begin with. You do not have to mount the rain collector component on the same pole as the wind detector. Or if you prefer you can mount the rain collector lower on the pole to make it easy to clean out and reduce birds roosting on it. Birds do not want their nests too low for predators to get them so if you mound it about 5 feet off the ground they will probably not bother. I have had this for over two years in very severe weather right on the river edge and have had no problems with its performance. I clocked a 58 mph gust yesterday. I have not seen most of the problems that people have cited. I actually have two at our homes and both have performed perfectly.