The Weather at Howhill


Station News

27th September 2011

Just got the weather station connected and back online. It will take a while before all the graphs etc catch up with the current data. There is nothing for the period 4th to 27th.

4th September 2011

Due to major works happening at Howhill the weather station and webcam will not be updating on a regular basis for at least the next two months

The weather station may appear again in the next week or so but the webcam will be offline until the works are complete. When the webcam returns it will be in a new position and may have a new camera.


16th June 2010

The Just Giving link above is for my partner, Sue. She is going to take part in a Ladies Driving Challenge on the 3rd of July in support of The Fire Fighters Charity. The Fire Fighters Charity helps and supports the many fire service personnel who are injured in the course of their duty protecting us, our homes, our workplaces and the enviroment.

She will get the chance to drive a fire engine, a bus, a lorry and maybe even a tank. All she has driven before is a Ford Fiesta and being only 5'1" it might be quite a challenge getting into some of those vehicles let alone driving them. So please follow the link above and sponsor her. Thank you.


25th November 2009

The gale last week shifted the wind vane arm alignment so the SW'ly wind since then has been recorded as N'ly. Being unable to track down suitable U bolts I have improvised with a couple of ordinary bolts and a bit of scrap Aluminium. The rain gauge has also been playing up, not recording anything despite long periods of heavy rain. I think the drip wire was obstructing the buckets but why it should start to do that I don't understand, nothing has changed. The gauge should now be working properly.

7th June 2009

The rain gauge had been playing up for a few weeks and didn't register any rain when it fell quite hard for a few hours. Here is the reason: spiders and rain gauges don't mix.

16th March 2009

Google are changing the way the ads work. They are bringing in an "interest-based" tracking method of selecting the ads that are shown to you.

You can opt-out of this tracking by Google (and YouTube) by visiting the Google Ads Preferences Manager. Further information about this interest tracking is available from Google at Interest-based advertising: How it works.

I can't say I'm overly happy about this change but reading through the above link it might not be as bad as it sounds. I am not currently going to opt my site out of this scheme.


13th January 2009

Tweaked the wind vane arm back around to point South. The indicated wind direction is now correct (until it moves again...).

11th January 2009

As expected after the wind got up the alignment of the wind vane is no longer correct.

3rd January 2009

Bit of a re-design of the site, the content is more or less the same just presented a little better.

The wind vane is pointing in the right direction but I've yet to find a source of suitable U bolts. If it gets really windy again it could get blown out of alignment.


23rd October 2008

More problems with the wind direction sensor. When I replaced it last month the old U bolts were so corroded, after many years outside, that they simply sheared when trying to undo the nuts. I improvised with cable ties to attach the sensor arm to the mast. But the recent high winds have rotated the arm around the mast so the indicated direction is currently incorrect. At a guess I'd say that 120 degrees needs to be subtracted from the indicated bearing.

22nd September 2008

The wind direction sensor seized solid a few days ago. Fortunately a week or so back there was a knock on the door and a gentleman from Carlisle Ski Club was there clutching a bag of external sensors from a WM918 weather station. Apparently one of their members has upgraded their station and has kindly donated the old sensors to me. I have just installed the anemometer and wind vane and now have direction indication back. Many thanks to the anonymous donor.

23 June 2007

Added Google Ads to the top and bottom of each page. You never know I might get a few pennies to spend on the weather station or webcam.

14 April 2006

I have got the main graphs back online now and the main webcam image is working. However I'm still having trouble getting the thumbnails generated for the last 24hrs webcam page.

13 April 2006

No graphs are currently being plotted as I am in the process of upgrading the server and have yet to install the required tools.

23 February 2006

The external temperature and humidity sensor has decided it no longer wishes to send any data. So the temperature and humidity graphs don't reflect reality at the moment. Later, it has cured itself, I like faults like that.

6 July 2005

The rain gauge has been installed for a few days now and appears to be working well. It has yet to rain and be windy at the same time to see if the new position cures the vertical upward rain problem.

25 June 2005

At last most of the external sensors (temperature, humidity, wind direction and speed) are back. Reconstruction of the shed took longer than anticipated due to having to completely rebuild two walls due too excessive rot and poor weather. A 6' x 8' panel catches a lot of wind...

The rain gauge I hope to get back up within the next week, it'll be in a different location in an attempt to avoid the vertical, but upward, rain that affected it readings in high winds.


28 April 2005

The Howhill weather station is offline apart from the internal readings. The whole shed to which the all the external sensors where attached is currently resting on its roof 15' from its base. Just a bit windy today, probably about F7 to F8, gusting to 50mph+. Normally the shed would survive that sort of wind but due to the renovation work it was empty. See the upturned shed.

27 April 2005

Due to renovation work on the shed the anemometer and wind vane are currently offline. Given good weather they will return tommorow.

1 April 2005

The Howhill Weather site has been revamped to make it easier to maintain and ensure that the "look" is consistent across all pages. The weather pages are all now W3C XHMTL v1.0 Strict and W3C CSS standards compliant.

20 March 2005

Well the station "just works" but I've just spent a few days making the web site easier to maintain, consistent and W3C XHTML v1.0 and W3C CSS compliant. Not quite finished yet or really "live" but will change over in the next few days.

26 February 2003

We now have a broadband connection so the pages should be updated just past every hour from now on.

8 February 2003

Anemometer has thrown a wobbly again! Hopefully I will get a chance to investigate the cause later on today. I really don't think it's the reed switch again, maybe a cable fault.

15 January 2003

Anemometer and wind vane now back up and working. Hopefully the conformal coating will ensure that this repair lasts a little longer.

13 January 2003

Anemometer reed switch has failed again. Lots of corrosion in the area of my last repair. Waiting for some conformal coating to arrive before repairing and re-installing outside. Hopefully sometime tommorow.

5 January 2003

Looks like the external temperature and humidity sensor is playing up and not giving a reading. Pity it seems to be getting a tad cold out there, the last reading was -5.2°C.

27 December 2002

The ISDN line is not working very well. Two faults in the last 2 weeks cleared by a "reset". This time I had horrible crackles on voice and *very* slow data before the reset. It may well die totally between now and Monday when the enginners might come to fix it properly. If it does die the hourly updates won't happen just when I manually connect to the internet via good old analogue modem.

BT Engineer called Saturday morning found faulty connection outside. Line now back to normal.


30 October 2002

A new reed switch has been fitted to the Anemometer. On testing the old switch was a bit iffy in its switching.

29 October 2002

Anemometer and wind vane disconnected for maintenance, though I don't currently seem able to get into the housing to do any work on them.

15 October 2002

Temporarily mended the wiring to the anemometer and wind vane. Rain gauge is still out of action. The F5 (20mph) wind and associated -5°C wind-chill were not conducive to doing much more.

14 October 2002

Problem with the wiring to the anemometer and wind vane means that both of these instruments are currently off line. I hope to attack this long standing problem in the near future.

20 August 2002

The ISDN line is down and BT seem to have run out of engineers to fix it. The off-peak hourly updates will reappear when the line is back.

30 June 2002

Changed the HTML coding to use a stylesheet. Please let me know if anything is now broken or otherwise mangled.

Howhill Weather
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Updated:
Thu 19 Jul 2018, 09:41 BST