The Tempest (Rating: 6/10) is a current entry to the scene, and like Netatmo it goals to provide you a variety of info with a restricted footprint. Though the {hardware} is bigger than Netatmo’s, it’s extra discreet than AcuRite and Ambient’s, trying a bit like a chook feeder and meant to be mounted on a pole (not included) someplace in your yard or in your roof. The system additionally requires an indoor module that relays information from the sensor to your Wi-Fi community, however that module doesn’t present any indoor local weather info. Setup is pretty painless, at the least compared to most different climate stations in the marketplace.
Tempest offers fairly a bit of knowledge, together with temperature, humidity, barometric strain, wind velocity/path, lighting strike data, and UV information. The system additionally measures rain exercise, nevertheless it does so with no conventional rain-catching funnel. Instead, Tempest makes use of a haptic rain sensor, primarily measuring when and the way forcefully water droplets hit the highest of the machine. It’s surprisingly correct and so much much less messy than the everyday rain sensor—and it doesn’t must be cleaned periodically.
Tempest’s temperature readings are likely to run a bit of excessive, and its climate forecasts have been the worst on this roundup, lacking on common by 5.2 levels. Tempest’s forecasts are typically fairly wild, together with one which guessed the excessive can be 9 levels decrease than Netatmo and one other that forecast a 30 p.c likelihood of “wintry mix” precipitation on a day when there was no rain and we had a 40-degree low. That’s odd as a result of forecasting is meant to be Tempest’s forte, utilizing machine studying to “significantly improve the forecast over time,” per the corporate. I’ve been testing the machine for a number of months and nonetheless see some fairly out-there predictions on in any other case unremarkable days.
My different criticism with Tempest is that its app isn’t as helpful because it might be. The real-time and forecast views on the primary web page are intuitive, however if you wish to delve into historical past, you might be offered solely with a numeric information sheet of every day’s climate. Going again in time means flipping by means of web page after web page, in the future at a time, till you discover the day that pursuits you, with no long-term charts or graphs to be discovered.
Overall, I do like Tempest regardless of its faults, particularly due to the {hardware}, however $329 is asking an terrible lot for the equipment. With an up to date app and a few fine-tuning to the AI, I could also be inclined to revise my score upward down the road.
