Have you ever found a product that was just so well designed and carefully thought out that it just had no competition? Meet the Tempest weather station by Weatherflow.
In four short years, Weatherflow has exploded into the commercial and private weather sectors with their patented Nearcast technology. With exclusive crowd-sourced data and ai technology, Weatherflow promises that Tempest will provide you with the most accurate weather forecasts guaranteed. That’s a pretty big guarantee! How does it work?
Tempest arrives in a fully recyclable sturdy branded box. Inside is some paperwork (a quickstart manual), the weather station itself, an optional pole mount, a hub and power cable and a single wood screw.
Full transparency, I have been actually sitting on this review for a while. In Ontario Canada our weather has been rather cold and Getting a pole into the ground until very recently, wasn’t possible. Luckily a few days of 80 degree weather gave me the perfect opportunity to put everything to work!
Before installation, I plugged the wifi base station into power and placed it in my office which is close to the yard where the Tempest will be installed.
For my installation, I went with an 8” foot 4×4 pressure treated wooden post and a fence post anchor like this one. Both of these items are available at your local Lowes, Home Depot or lumber store. Weatherflow recommends getting your mount as level as possible so I used a level to monitor the post as I drove it into the ground with a sledge hammer. After the anchor was in the ground I removed the mount already attached to the Tempest and used the included wood screw to attach the mount to the top of the post. The fence post anchor made installation super simple and once the Tempest was attached, it was just a matter of tightening the bolts on the anchor to secure everything.
For another mounting option, Weatherflow offers a universal mount ideal for fences as well as other accessories like a bird deterrent and an optional power booster in the event your Tempest’s location doesn’t get enough sun (more on that later). All are very reasonably priced.
After your pole is mounted, Tempest needs to be pointed to True north. Weatherflow makes this easy by putting an indicator right on the Tempest weather station. I just used the compass app on my iPhone to find True north (make sure your iphone compass is set to true north in the settings) and spun the Tempest on its mount to the right point. This was super easy.
Once my Tempest was mounted and pointed in the right direction, I downloaded the Tempest app and communicated via bluetooth to the hub in my office and began pulling data from the Tempest in literally minutes, right while I was still on the ladder!
In the Tempest app there’s a plethora of settings and options. Weatherflow even provides you with your own personal web page for your weather station so you can share your weather forecasts with neighbors and friends. There’s also Amazon Alexa and Siri integration so you can call up forecasts using your favorite voice assistant as well as Apple watch integration. Tempest will even talk to your other smart home devices to alter things like the AC or furnace when the temperature changes or lights at dusk or sunrise. The sky’s the limit (pun intended).
I could go on for days about the tech inside the Tempest but one of my favorite features is the haptic rain sensor (no water reservoir!) that tracks rain onset, duration, intensity and accumulation. The wind sensor located just underneath the rain sensor tracks wind in real time and using the app, I can see the wind changing directions as it’s happening. There’s even a lightning sensor that will track lightning strikes up to 40km (25 miles) away.
There’s so much more than meets the eye with the Tempest weather station. There’s lots of 3rd party app integration with apps like Weather Underground. Weatherflow even offers the Rachio Smart Sprinkler controller that will talk to your Tempest and update your lawn watering schedule based on weather patterns like rain, freezing or particularly dry periods. Weatherflow has literally thought of everything. There’s not one single thing not to like about this product. If you’ve been on the fence about a weather station or you’re into tracking weather patterns and super detailed statistics, this is an absolute must have.
Note: Our reviews are always 100% independent but Gearadical receives a small affiliate amount if you purchase the product on Amazon.
