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Reviews For: Oregon Scientific WM-918

Category: Weather Stations

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Review Summary For : Oregon Scientific WM-918
Reviews: 13MSRP: 299.95
Description:
Budget wired weather station.
Sensors for temp, humidity, rainfall, wind, pressure.
Product is in production
More Info: http://www.oregonscientific.com/
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
00133.8
W4VR Rating: 2002-02-02
Most of them are defective Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I bought two of these units a couple of years ago. I had nothing but problems with them. Display would blank out every 2 minutes. RF was not a problem in my situation. After waiting almost a year, the company sent me four new outdoor sensors and two new distribution boxes. Now one of them works fine, but the other one still has hiccups. I don't recommend this unit. spend a few more dollars and get a Davis or something similar. W4VR
KA7GKN Rating: 2002-02-02
If you can't afford a good one this might be the unit for you Time Owned: more than 12 months.
The first 6 months I had it it did not work and I spent many phone calls to finally get the mfg to send replacement parts and upgraded chips under warranty!!!!
reliability, accuracy, dependability, is fair to good at times. often when you look at the display to get a reading you see "---" and have to wait!
I think it might be sensitive to rf and that cause the unit to hic-cup.

A main complaint you have to go through each selection to reset the memory!!! They should have had a single button to reset all at once.

The rain and wind gauges are not very accurate but will give you enough data to know when to lower the tower.

This is a low end made in China wanna be top end unit. I found it at fry's electronics for $199.00 and said ok, i'll try it.

One of these days when I acquire surplus money I'll replace it with a Davis or some other better quality unit.
G4AON Rating: 2002-02-02
Cheapest weather station? Time Owned: more than 12 months.
These weather stations were also sold under the Radio Shack brand. They are probably the lowest cost weather stations around, there are some bargains with prices down to 148 UK pounds (around $200) for the complete station.

There are a few problems with these stations, but considering most of us cannot install them in a location that would justify spending more money, then they are good value.

Like many weather stations, these suffer from electrical glitches, especially from thunder storms. I've added ferrite rings to the sensor cables and find it performs OK with these added.

The wind speed doesn't seem to read "correctly" above speeds of 30 miles per hour, although I haven't tried taking it for a test on the car roof... The rain gauge read low compared to a manual gauge along side it. Adjusting the gauge is a simple matter but takes several days of rainfall to get it set correctly.

The pressure sensor can be calibrated from the front panel if you know the actual pressure. In my case it's easy as the local airport pressure readings are on the internet (weatherunderground.com).

Weather data can be collected by connecting a computer to the serial port, data buffers are available if you don't want to leave your computer running all the time (in the UK try http://www.skyview.co.uk/ for a data buffer). I run an old 486 computer, with Windows 95, using Weather Logger (http://jorick.freeyellow.com/wx200.htm) to log data. My data is uploaded manually to the internet with data from May 1999 being available in text files at: http://www.astromag.co.uk/wx.html

The weather station has been running for more than two and a half years without a fault.