I don’t trust the weather.

Earlier this week it felt chilly in my office, which was exactly the problem. I suspected that it only felt chilly. I suspected that it was not in fact really chilly, but my fallible human form was reading a false positive. I wished I had an objective way to determine if it was truly chilly in my office. I’m sure some of you might have been satisfied with your illusion of being cold, but I refuse to live the lie. It’s obvious that my office needs a thermometer.
I could have simply bought a thermometer to measure the temperature in my office….but why stop there when I can have a full fledge weather station in my office? This thing measures the inside temperature, the outside temperature, tracks inside/outside humidity, shows the phase of the moon, and has WWVB radio controlled time. I think it’s obviously why this is the superior solution.

Earlier this week I endeavored to set up my new weather station with visions of being superiorly informed about the state of the weather dancing in my head. Part of the weather station is a little sensor that sits outside and wireless transmits data back to the home station. The building outside my office is all concrete and metal…not exactly the easiest thing to mount the sensor to. There aren’t any protruding appendages to cable tie the sensor to either. Fortunately the sensor came with an adhesive sticky pad, so I stick the sensor to the metal frame of my window. A few minutes later I’m back in my office experiencing weather information bliss (so this is why the Weather Channel won an Ace award).

I knew my outdoor sensor would get some direct sun in the afternoon, so my afternoon readings would probably be skewed….I didn’t expect to look at the weather station and see that the outdoor temperature was 105 degrees…. Evidently it gets kind of toasty on the metal and concrete in the direct sun. After a day and a half of being broiled in the sun the adhesive pad called it quits and my outdoor senor fell to earth. I considered this a momentary set back and brought the sensor back inside while I considered secondary mounting options….that’s when my problems started.

At first it was all fun and games. I just stuck the sensor in my fridge (did I mention my office has its own fridge?)…. I got my jollies as I watched the weather station report the new much colder temperature. The weather station has a happy or sad face that it displays. The manual is silent as to how the weather station decides if it is happy or sad. I’m left to my own devices to guess at what makes it displays one or the other. It changes pretty often so I’ve decided my weather station suffers from mood swings. Having its sensor placed in the fridge definitely made it sad though.

After I got my fridge kicks I took the sensor out of the fridge and placed it right next to the weather station…..that’s when I noticed it. The inside and the outside temperatures didn’t agree. The two sensors were sitting right next to each other and yet there was a 5 degree disparity between the two readings. What sort of rouge climate could exist in such a small area? Which was correct? Could I believe anything the weather station told me? Now I am left doubting. Is my weather station really sad right now (it claims to be). Perhaps my weather station suffers from indecision as well as mood swings.