Ambient Weather WS-5050 Ultrasonic Smart Weather Station

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.

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 bought my Ambient Weather WS-5000 to replace functionality I had with BloomSky 2 + Storm, which apparently are not really supported or operating solutions.The WS-5000 is mounted with the BloomSky, but the WS-5000 is transmitting clearly to the base station, and that base station is uploading to Weather Underground and Ambient Weather's own cloud data and app. Since the Rain Gauge oddly assumes it needs to sit at-the-top of a pole, based on how it mounts to a pole, it is mounted on a small pole bought for an outdoor WLAN AP attached to a fence post, and reporting rainfall as expected. Only down side is that my lawn service blows grass all over, so checking the Rain Gauge regularly after a mowing is needed to ensure there is not grass and debris in the platter or obstructing the hole, which does have a protective filter spring.Only disappointment is that inside temperature and humidity unit does not have a switch to set °C and only displays in °F, not my unit of choice.I've added 4 of the add-on WH31E units, and will probably add 4 more, since they provide granular information I want about my house, especially complex areas like attics and my basement data center.Adding the lightning and air quality detectors in the future is part of the plan.After adding the base station to my WiFi network (not easy typing on the base station, but workable), I was also able to utilize the configuration App, which is different from the Ambient Weather App, to update firmware and check configuration items, like Weather Underground.It was mentioned, but the Ambient Weather App on iPad (potentially android tablets too?) is great, with large views, but works well on a iPhone 13 Pro Max and is easy to read on the iPhone 12 Pro (smaller) also.