The Best Home Weather Stations
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I first ventured into the world of DIY weather forecasting five years ago when I reviewed four home weather stations that let you play armchair meteorologist, teasing out every last detail of your local climate. In my neck of the woods, the weather has certainly evolved over that time frame—“fire season” is now a dreaded annual thing here in California—and one would hope that home weather gadgetry would have evolved in that time span too.
Sure enough, it has. Today’s home weather stations are cheaper, more powerful, and do more than ever. Also, the old guard in this category have stepped up their mobile app game to compete with the newcomers on the market.
But the biggest question today isn’t what weather station to buy, it’s whether you need one at all. Hyper-local forecasts are widely available through sites like Weather Underground, where you can probably find a citizen reporting weather data from a location within a few hundred feet of your home. If a few of your neighbors have already installed weather stations, you may not really need one of your own. (There are at least seven stations within a mile or so of my house.)
But maybe that's not good enough for you. Maybe you really need to know what the weather is like directly outside your front door. After all, the guy down the street could have his weather station set up next to his barbecue grill, spoiling the readings. I get it, and if you need this level of agency, a weather station’s definitely for you. With that in mind, I looked at four leading brands—all within a “giftable” price range—to see whose weather is better, and whose forecast is finest. To gauge overall accuracy, I recorded each station’s high and low predictions for five consecutive days, compared those numbers against that station’s own measured high/lows for each day, then calculated the average variance in degrees for each of the 10 data points.
Update, July 7, 2021: This article was changed to reflect some recent improvements to the way data is presented in the Tempest app.
Be sure to read our other buying guides for the smart home. We have advice for buying smart bulbs, smart plugs, and home security cameras. We also have tips for getting the most out of your robot vacuum cleaner, and a guide to securely removing users from shared smart home devices.
The Budget Player
The WS-2902C from Ambient Weather (Rating: 6/10) is the cheapest weather station in our roundup, and while it gets the job done quite well, using it can be an underwhelming experience. The sensor array itself feels quite flimsy, and you’ll need to bring your own pole on which to mount it. The device arrives completely unassembled, and you’ll need to spend some time putting everything together like a plastic model before you can even dream of checking the local barometric pressure. The mounting system—which relies on two metal U-bolts tightened by a tiny, included wrench—doesn’t feel the most stable either.
The good news is there’s lots of information relayed: wind speed/direction, rainfall, UV, solar radiation, barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, dew point, heat index, and wind chill. While the station has seemingly solid accuracy (its 5-day error rate was 3.1 degrees Fahrenheit), the sensor recorded considerably lower “low” temps than all the other sensors, sometimes by as much as 10 degrees. Also, its sensor always tended to run about a degree lower than all the others even when it was warm outside.
All of this information is delivered via Ambient’s dedicated display, a chintzy and plasticky LCD affair that populates data (including interior conditions) on a decidedly busy screen. It’s a lot to take in, especially if you really just want to see how cold it is outside. You can get a more complete—if equally busy—view of this information by connecting the station to your Wi-Fi network, but this is a multi-step process that involves, among other things, a special app whose sole purpose is to tell you the station’s MAC address. Ambient populates your weather information on its detailed and immersive web-based dashboard, and the Ambient mobile app simply regurgitates it from there.
Ambient gets the job done, but it doesn’t exactly look great doing it. That said, if budget is critical, it’s a capable enough solution that merits some level of consideration.
The Perfectionist
The Atlas (Rating: 5/10) is the only other system in this roundup with a dedicated display, and the quality of that display is miles better than the cheapie LCD provided by Ambient Weather. This $230 system includes a full-color high-definition display (it’s not actually a touchscreen, despite claims on AcuRite's website), and its far better viewing angle alone makes it so much more compelling. It’s also better laid out and simply easier to read, including measurements of indoor and outdoor temperature, humidity, wind speed/direction, UV and light intensity, barometric pressure, and rain. An optional module, included at this price, can detect and record lightning strikes up to 25 miles away.
The hardware (considerably larger and more substantial than Ambient’s) comes largely preconstructed and sets up quickly, and a small mounting base is included in the kit. Where AcuRite fails—miserably—is in getting the system connected to Wi-Fi, so you can get all of this information via the web or the AcuRite app. This process is downright barbaric, requiring you to connect to AcuRite’s temporary network, plug in an IP address, then enter your Wi-Fi credentials on a bare-bones web page. This process failed for me repeatedly, requiring a half-dozen factory resets and plenty of prayer before finally, mercifully, beginning to work. It’s a wildly outdated system that would have made sense 12 years ago, but which is cruelly unfriendly to the user in today’s apptastic world.
Fortunately, once it’s working, it works fairly well, though the finicky screen occasionally freezes until you tap a button or two. Temperature readings were spot-on, and AcuRite’s forecast was actually the best in this roundup, with an average variance of just 2.1 degrees from actual temps. If having a perfect forecast is your biggest criteria, AcuRite’s product should be your go-to, and at $230, it’s hardly a bank-breaker. Ultimately, though, it’s just too unfriendly to recommend to the masses, not to mention its garish hardware footprint which may run afoul of your HOA.
The Best Overall
Eight years after the release of its first product, France’s Netatmo is by now a veteran in smart weather security. What’s surprising is that the Netatmo Smart Home Weather Station (Rating: 7/10, WIRED Recommends) has not changed considerably since its launch—and especially little since our last review of it in 2015.
The basic concept remains the same: You place a slim aluminum sensor inside, near your router, and another skinny tube outside. (It hangs easily from a screw or nail.) The outdoor sensor talks to the indoor sensor, which relays everything to the web and the Netatmo app. You can add additional indoor sensors ($60 each) if you want to get the temperature in other parts of the house, along with the recent additions of an anemometer wind gauge ($110) and a rain gauge ($80), all of which are sold a la carte. A full complement of gear including both gauges will run you $330, providing measurements of indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity, barometric pressure and—uniquely—indoor CO2 levels and sound levels, plus wind speed and rain via the new sensor add-ons.
Netatmo’s app is what makes it one of the best products in this space. It’s intuitive and easy to read, and it collects data forever. Want to see a graph of daily high and low temperatures over the last month? It’s easy to zoom in and out of the data to pinpoint exactly what interests you. Until I replaced my old Netatmo system with a new one for this review, I had access to years’ worth of data all in one place. Netatmo’s temperature gauge is quite accurate, but unfortunately its forecasts aren’t the best, with an average variance of 4.8 degrees. However, sometimes Netatmo really nails it when other units whiff: It was the only unit in the roundup to accurately predict a freak warm day in the middle of the test period.
Where Netatmo fails primarily is in installation. The setup process is convoluted and buggy, and it seems to have gotten worse over the years instead of better. Netatmo’s piecemeal approach also means you have to install each component individually, a complex process that involves strategically pressing buttons and removing/reinstalling batteries at just the right time. This process was even more complex because the sensors Netatmo sent me came with preinstalled batteries, all of which were dead on arrival, and the batteries in the wind meter were actually corroded. The system also has a tendency to randomly lose its Wi-Fi connection without warning, only to recover it a few hours later.
When Netatmo is working, it’s a dream. And perhaps its best feature is its discreet hardware, which can be hidden just about anywhere. Despite some issues, it’s still my top pick in this category, if by a small margin.
The Newcomer
The Tempest (Rating: 6/10) is a recent entry to the scene, and like Netatmo it aims to give you a lot of information with a limited footprint. Though the hardware is larger than Netatmo’s, it’s more discreet than AcuRite and Ambient’s, looking a bit like a bird feeder and intended to be mounted on a pole (not included) somewhere in your yard or on your roof. The system also requires an indoor module that relays data from the sensor to your Wi-Fi network, but that module doesn’t provide any indoor climate information. Setup is fairly painless, at least in comparison to most other weather stations on the market.
Tempest provides quite a bit of information, including temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed/direction, lighting strike info, and UV data. The system also measures rain activity, but it does so without a traditional rain-catching funnel. Instead, Tempest uses a haptic rain sensor, essentially measuring when and how forcefully water droplets hit the top of the device. It’s surprisingly accurate and a lot less messy than the typical rain sensor—and it doesn’t have to be cleaned periodically.
Tempest’s temperature readings tend to run a little high, and its weather forecasts were the worst in this roundup, missing on average by 5.2 degrees. Tempest’s forecasts tend to be pretty wild, including one that guessed the high would be 9 degrees lower than Netatmo and another that forecast a 30 percent chance of “wintry mix” precipitation on a day when there was no rain and we had a 40-degree low. That’s odd because forecasting is supposed to be Tempest’s forte, using machine learning to “significantly improve the forecast over time,” per the company. I’ve been testing the device for several months and still see some pretty out-there predictions on otherwise unremarkable days.
My other complaint with Tempest is that its app isn’t as useful as it could be. The real-time and forecast views on the main page are intuitive, but if you want to delve into history, you are presented only with a numeric data sheet of each day’s weather. Recent improvements now let you see a digest of the weather by week, month, or year, and this information is now also available graphically, albeit in an entirely different part of the app.
Overall, I do like Tempest despite its faults, namely because of the hardware, but $329 is asking an awful lot for the kit. With an updated app and some fine-tuning to the AI, I may be inclined to revise my rating upward down the line.
