AcuRite weather station misadventure…

With cold weather finally approaching, I decided to remove the Duracell alkaline batteries from my AcuRite 3-in-1 sensor for my weather station, and replace them with Energizer Lithium batteries which are supposed to stand up to the cold better.   Sounds simple doesn’t it?

Well the physical replacement of the batteries was easy enough,  expect the springs in the battery compartment tend to want to kick the batteries back out.  I find turning the batter once in place a turn or two will get the spring to center better and less likely to pop the battery back out..

When I came back in I discovered the display was not getting any signal.   So I went out with my volt meter and seen plenty of voltage, then I remember the channel switch on the sensor is under the batteries.. and Sure enough, got changed when installing the new batteries.    When I came back in the display for the 3 in 1 was coming back  to life.    That was the easy part…

I also to a Acu-Link Bridge to connect to the AcuRite “My Backyard” website, which in turn relays some of the info to the Weather Underground website .  This is where the problems started..  The websites had stopped updating, the AcuLick was show two 3-in-1 sensors because the change of the channel switch made it see a “different” sensor, so the websites broke because they weren’t getting data from the sensor that they had been..

I had to reset the AcuLink a few times until in finally only showed the 3-in-1 sensor correctly and not the ghost of the accidental switch change.  The My Backyard site got all confused…  and had stalled updating at the time the original batteries had been removed.   I ended up having to deleted all the sensors on the profile, loosing all my weather history saved there, including my rain gauge which is only stored online because I bought the rain gauge separately  in a bundle withe AcuLink bridge with no desktop display for it.   But eventually I got the weather display back, but missing all the history dating back to when I bought the weather station last winter.  I can live with out it, but I’m not impressed on how the My Backyard site works..

I also discovered the updated were no longer going out to Weather Underground because My Backyard decided it was reading from a different sensor that wasn’t authorized to send out data to WU.  So I had to re-enable that also.

So now everything seem to be back to normal, except the internal info webpage of the AcuLink is showing the signal strength of both the 3-in-1 and rain gauge one ‘bar’ less signal then they normally do.. buy that just could be interference.  While I like the AcuRite weather station as a whole, it does have some short comings, especially when it come to the AcuLink and My Backyard products.   Another problem is My Backyard will not send rain gauge info from the stand alone gauge I have out to Weather Underground for some reason..  I can’t understand why they won’t give a option to include something as important in weather as rain to be published out to public website.  I did contact AcuRite tech support about this some time ago, and just got a ‘that’s the way it works‘ type reply.   The only way to get rain info to WU from an AcuRite system is get the 5-in-1 sensor.  Which I found very disapproving when I bought the rain gauge and AcuLink Bridge.

While it’s a nice system, when the day comes to replace it, I will probably go with something else that is easier to do what I want.