2006-07-18

No wind? Really?

Today, as of the time of writing, the WS3600 hasn't recorded a single instance of wind speed above 0mph (the last record was at 2006-07-17 20:17:06 BST with a wind speed of 0.2mph). This isn't so unusual, I've seen periods before when the wind speed has sat at 0 for a large part of the day before it finally picks up. To the best of my knowledge I've only once had a whole day of not recording any wind — and that was because of snow.


The temperature today is close to 30°C so I don't think snow's a problem.

What makes this really odd is that there actually is a nice breeze out there at the moment. The vane itself is turning around from time to time in the breeze, I am recording different directions, I'm just not seeing any speed at all.

Given that the breeze is light and gusty I suppose it's possible that the base station is just never catching it while the impeller is turning (and I think I've seen it turning, sort of hard to tell as it's quite high up) but I can't help but think that this is unlikely.

The other thing I'm wondering is if the heat is causing a problem. It's probably the hottest day I've had so far since running the weather station, could it be that the heat has caused the impeller to stick or something?

All that said, I'm not the only person with this problem. Tim, who runs a WS2300 up in Perth in Scotland, is also seeing the same thing.

Update at 16:52 BST: There's quite a stiff breeze out there now and I've been out to have another look — despite the wind the impleller isn't spinning at all. It would appear that, for one reason or another, it's got stuck.

Update at 17:41 BST: I've had a further look at the impeller with a binocular and I can't see that there's anything there that would cause it to stick (a nice fat bumblebee for example). There's a more-or-less constant breeze now and nothing's happening. At the moment it would appear that, one way or another, today's heat has caused it to stick (probably through something expanding).

File Under: Weather Station, WS3600, Wind Speed.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi I get the same problem.
Its small spiders making nests round the impeller. The worst is in Sept-Oct time.
Clean and spay with a small silicone.

John.

Dave Pearson said...

In this case I think it really was the heat.