Netatmo Wireless Anemometer with wind speed and direction sensor – Wind Gauge for Weather Station, NWA01-WW, black

I think the Netatmo weather station is great. I've just added the long-awaited wind gauge to my existing set-up which includes the rain gauge and an additional indoor monitor. The wind gauge is smaller than I expected and it seems well made. As usual with Netatmo products, the instructions are minimal, but I had no problem pairing the new module with the existing base station. Positioning the wind gauge involves orienting it to the north and placing it as high up as possible. As Netatmo's own mounting adaptor isn't released yet, the wind gauge is currently positioned at the top of a sloping flower bed. That's not ideal, but I'll see how it goes. Positioning it at roof level (or above) is suggested but that makes changing batteries a hassle. There are no moving parts, of course, so weather station aficionados are bound to be sceptical. But no moving parts means no maintenance apart from changing batteries. I'm impressed so far.Update (4.1.16): The mounting hardware is on its way. Something that's happened twice since adding the wind gauge to the weather station is some anomalous wind speed reporting. Once, it spiked to 111 mph (it was 8 mph) and on another occasion, 4 mph. There are numerous reports of this on the Netatmo forum, but Netatmo haven't responded with any comment. The jury is out about the reliability of the device.

In the past twenty years I have had several different wireless weather systems and they all presented different problems with connectivity, battery life and durability. Netatmo products are very much like Apple products, they work straight out of the box and keep on working without any constant attention and without the need for extra interface hubs and routers.The wind gauge is such a device, fit the batteries, perform a simple setup procedure on your indoor module and iPhone or other device and its working, simple.Positioning and getting the direction to north correct takes a few seconds more than say the rain gauge but its all working in minutes.A true no brainer folks.You are now able to check all your weather readings wherever in the world you are, so you will know that your runner beans are being properly watered or not perhaps, but that is another automated system you could think about.

Got a Netatmo weather station last year for Xmas, excellent kit works well no problems. Added the Anemometer and Rain Gauge this year, big mistake. The cosmetic quality and feel was very good, these are expensive items but neither "add on" worked. The rain gauge just would not connect to the weather station no matter what I did so waste of time and money straight off there. The Anemometer connected to the base station and worked OK but constantly reported a flat battery (despite trying new batteries several times including the factory fitted ones) the sensor was not working. This means that the thing emails every half an hour demanding the battery is changed ASAP. So most of Xmas day was spent by me climbing ladders and faffing about with these items pointlessly, and my wife didn't get her Xmas present. Returning both to Amazon who "cannot replace them" and will refund the cash. Both of these items dead on arrival with critical faults looks suspicious to me, purporting to be quality "smart" devices the ones I got are bug ridden rubbish and wasted a lot of my time and patience. I won't be buying anything from this bunch of clowns again.

It seems very accurate for wind direction. For wind speed, I'm not convinced it has a high enough sampling rate to capture volatile gusty weather and pick out the strongest gust over, say, a 5 minute period. A nice feature is that if you can't mount the sensor at 10m above the ground, you can use an adjustment coefficient (via the Netatmo app) to correct for this - assume based on the log wind profile.A significant downside (and why only 2 stars) is that after being mounted on a pole above a roof for 8 months the sensor stopped working. I assumed that the batteries had ran out, but I had hoped they would last longer. However, on inspection, the lower section of the sensor unit where the batteries live was half full of water. This is despite the base being screwed on securely. So, poor weather sealing lets this down. Thankfully after drying out with hair dryer and replacing with new batteries, it works again, but have sealed up with insulating tape. Let's see how it goes this time!UPDATE: The sensor leaked again. Seems that water was getting in through the central 'tube' down into the battery section in the base. The battery section was sealed apart from this. Reported this to Netatmo and the replaced the wind unit free of charge, as I still had the receipt etc and took photos. Customer service was excellent, so changed to 4/5 stars from 2/5. Fingers crossed this new sensor will not leak.

Excellent addition to my existing Netatmo weather station setup. Easy to register and link to the base unit. The most tricky part was finding how to mount it securely, and high enough to measure the wind. I found an easy solution in the end. Basically, I used black PVC waste pipe with an end-stop at the end. Into the end-stop I bolted a tripod mount screw I found on Amazon Phot-R­® 1/4"-20 Dual Nuts Tripod Mount Screw to Flash Digital Camera Hot Shoe Adapter and then the Wind Gauge simply attaches to that. This means you can get it up quite high on the house for example and fixing is lower down using simple PVC pipe brackets. All told, the mount costed me about £5 in materials, was easy to fit and looks great. See attached photos.

The quality of the product is excellent, and it is easy to connect to the Netatmo system. It would be better if a better mount is supplied, as I had to construct a mount high enough for it.