The heater thermostat was not adjustable. After several cloudy days, this situation required more power than the solar unit and batteries could maintain, causing an excess drain on the system. Therefore, it was necessary to entrench the 120 volt cable. The weather station is a Davis Instruments solar powered Wireless Weather Monitor II mounted on an outside post. The station takes readings every 3 seconds for temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, and wind direction.
Rainfall is measured whenever the two tiny calibrated buckets fill, tip and empty.
This data is sent by wireless to the Monitor II console, located indoors. These become the data points archived by the console. WLink CGI software from Electric Park Research running on an iMac is used to convert the raw archived weather data to graphics. WLink retrieves the archived data via a serial line connection from the Monitor II console. It uses temperature and humidity to calculate dew point, uses temperature and wind speed to calculate wind chill, generates the Current Weather display and the 18 graphs in the Weather Archive , and serves these up via Netpresenz web server sofware.