My old Acurite WX station is due to be replaced. While I have thought I wanted a tempest to replace it,I recently came across the ecowitt stations. Does anyone have one of these? What are you thoughts? Would you recommend them?
I don’t have the weather station but I do have a number of their devices and their wifi gateway. Integration (thanks to our
Antipodean friend @sburke781) works great and is all local. I will be adding the weather station as soon as the ground thaws.
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Yep. Seeing someone else mention the moisture sensors and that gateway are what got me to look at them in the first place. If I could get my Rachio to work with it as well that would be great.
As for the moisture sensors I have a few house plants up high that would benefit from it. I'd consider putting some in the yard too, but I would be afraid they would get busted up by the mower.
The weather station I was looking at looks like the display works as the wifi gateway, does that sound about right?
Hmmm not sure about that. I don't have a display, just this guy...
Just looking at the website it appears the displays do functiion as gateways. You might check the thread here
Or perhaps @sburke781 knows?
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In a lot of cases the displays can act as a gateway. Post the model you are looking at and I / we can take a look.
Not sure about the Rachio stuff, haven't heard of anyone using them with the drivers
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Heads up on what's coming from them-
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I do not have an Ecowitt weather station, but I do have the gateway working with an Ambient station. That said, of the three weather stations I have (no, it was not really intentional, I wrote drivers for two of them and other weather services) my order of preference for stations are:
- Tempest
- Ambient
- Accurate (which I would not get anymore)
The Ambient/Ecowitt (station/gateway) was an excellent combination for local weather, until Ambient included local in their new firmware. But the Ecowitt gateway allows for a whole slew of additional sensors. If their new stations combine the gateway function in, even better
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I've got some of these and wondered if they went down far enough to be accurate for a lawn. I can mow around them, but the probe is only ~2 1/2" and seems like you'd need something that goes deeper for a lawn.
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I'd imagine they are probably long enough for most lawn types to at least give you an indication of the conditions, as long as you can get the above ground part sitting as close to the top of the soil as possible.
I'd also be removing them when mowing the lawn, there is enough bulk to the above-ground part that I wouldn't want to be moving over the top of it.
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So you're saying you bury them up to the upper end of the green part of the sensor, past the dark part of the probe? Am I getting that right?
We have Bermuda grass (less water/better in hot weather) and it tends to have deeper roots than Fescue, AFAIK.
I don't have mine in the lawn, but was just saying I would want to make sure you get the black part completely in the soil, not so much the green part needed to be below ground.
And I guess with the depth, these could at least give you an indication of the moisture content, even if they don't go down to the base of the roots
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Yeah...I did just a little searching and didn't find anything that went really deep.
I did see below, which was a little scary. 
Six feet!?! Like a monster movie... sounds like if can get the sensor down into the lawn a little that will be close.
Bermudagrass roots can grow to a depth of six feet or more depending on soil profile characteristics. However, the majority of the root system, 80% or more, is found in the top 6 inches of soil.
I'm going to put two sensors in the lawn, one at a shadier area, one where there's more sun.
EDIT: Turns out bad idea...accidentally mowed over one of the sensors and decapitated it. So I removed the other, and am doing w/out lawn moisture sensors in the lawn for now.
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This is the one I was thinking about.
https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07FMKKBX5
Looks like it's not available in the US though... Might be able to buy it direct, are any of those frequencies compatabke in the US?
Bermuda what I have, but the roots are no where near six feet much less six inches. Maybe 3 at most.
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Not sure how much you need a display (mine are tucked away in corners and nobody every really checks them). If you can do without one you could save some money with their GW1101.
Searching for anything Ecowitt off of Amazon.com.au really did not find me any decent results... so not sure what is going on there.
Ecowitt allows you to buy just about every single piece separately (including the displays) if you want. The bundles do provide a bit of savings but not a ton.
I'm not in Australia, that's just the link I got of their website. I'm in the US, and they don't have much there either.
I do use the display quite a bit on my current WX station. How does the GW connect to the wifi and your hub?
Ecowitt's app (WS View) can add the Ecowitt Gateway in pretty easily and it adds it to the WiFi during that process (like most home WiFi devices now).
From there I use my drivers (there are a couple choices so I will just link to the community drivers page). Not sure why mine do not get more hits through here since they are fairly popular but whatever. 
There are instructions in my driver (I think the other ones also) but it basically involves setting the Ecowitt to send the data to a custom location (your Hubitat's IP) with a specific port # so the Hubitat recognizes it. Then creating a virtual device on the Hubitat with your Ecowitt's MAC address the DNI (lowecase, no : or spaces in it, for example AB:CD:EF:01:23:45 would become abcdef012345 as the DNI). From then on if the Hubitat gets anything from that MAC on the port it will send it to that device's driver to handle.
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Well I think I am going to eventually go with the Ecowitt weather station. In the meantime, I picked up that gateway and a moisture sensor to start with, I have a few ideas about what I can do with their stuff.
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I give up on sensors in the lawn. I have a few still there I couldn't find before winter. And the batteries go dead by the next year. And they didn't seem to really help the watering schedule anyway. I just turn up the watering minutes myself as the summer gets hotter.
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Yeah. I don't think I'll go so far as the lawn. Initially probably a few house and potted porch plants. It sounds like an interesting idea, but I think it's going to be much more hassle than it is really worth.
But I do think I'm gong to go for the weather station eventually.
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