It is now October in Maine

Good morning from the northwest end of Augusta, Maine. We have a cloudy and wet morning outside, but for the moment, it has stopped raining. Today's temps are expected to top out in the mid 60's with more rain comingin the afternoon hours.    

This morning's readings are:

a relative humidity of 96% with a Dew Point of 59.3ºF.

The temperature is 60.5ºF.

The wind velocity this morning is between 1.4 mph and 4.0 mph out of theNorth . The winds are expected to freshen after the noontime hours to gusts in excess of 20 to 25 mph. With the rain and leaves being on the roads, it can be slippery driving out there, so be careful.

The highest gust recorded in the past month remains a boring 23.3 mph. 

our Barometric pressure is 29.65 and falling.

Our rainfall last night was 0.05 in., in the past week a total of 0.85 in. giving us a total for the month of September of 4.18 inches.

I have been asked where I get my weather data readings from. Like many others, I have my own source of weather data from weather instrumentation that I own and have put up myself. As I said yesterday, purchasing that weather station, a wireless one, was my only cash outlay.

The outdoor mounting of the Rain gauge and anemometer was done with what I had laying around my garage.

Attached to today's posting is a picture of my anemometer and how I mounted it.

This device is powered by a small solar panel, thus removing the need to take the device down and replace batteries.

This powers the transmission of the wind speed and wind direction to the hygrometric relay that in turn, transmits that data, along with the rain gauge readings, to the indoor base station so that the wind chill can be calculated. The outdoor dew point and humidity readings are also transmitted indoors so that it can be tracked and stored on my laptop computer.

La Crosse technology also has a software package that is easily downloaded to your laptop where it can display the data that is stored on the indoor base station.

The mounting of the anemometer in the picture is easy and cheap. As I said, I found the materials to mount it in the garage.

The lower part of the pole is actually a mounting pipe for a bird feeder, and the smaller pipe that is in the top of it is a piece of ½ pipe that was laying around the back end of the garage.

The pipe assembly is screwed to two snow fence stantions whose bases are buried 3 feet in the ground. Removal of one screw  in the mounting enable me to "tilt-down" the tower if needed.

The guy wires are actually lengths of jack chain that I had in the garage, and they are attached to lengths of cable that are wrapped around fireplace bricks that are buried 2 feet in the well-grassed clay-filled soil.

Total height of this tower is only 12 feet, and it has withstood 52 mile an hour winds that hurricane Irene brought to town.

Here I note that anemometers should be mounted 30 feet above the nearest obstruction within 300 feet for optimal readings. This is also the recommended mounting height for wind turbines, so it is an understandable height.

Obviously, this one is not so mounted. But then again, I'm not, nor am I usually at a height of 30 feet above the nearest obstruction within 300 feet. Most people aren't.

Besides, I don't have anything 30 feet long laying around my garage to mount it on. So this configuration will do just fine.

 As I said in yesterday's post, this is why you should never, ever throw anything away that you might need for something some day.