Netatmo Rain Gauge Review

The Netatmo Weather station was a great bit of kit that left a lot of people asking for a couple of extra features, one of which is a rain gauge.

As with the original Netatmo weather station the Netatmo rain gauge is a really well constructed bit of kit. It operates a tipping bucket measurement system (see video below to see the mechanism) which you can see when you unscrew the bottom battery compartment section.  The battery compartment is (unsurprisingly!) waterproof but easy to get to when the time comes to replace the batteries.

Adding the rain gauge to the existing Netatmo setup was fairly easy, just follow the instructions on the app and it does the rest. You’ll need to carry out this task in the same room as the weather station, but once completed the gauge doesn’t need to be near the main station as it feeds data back via wifi. This does mean you’ll need to place it outdoors in a position that it can still connect to your network.

After the app setup things went a bit wrong, it’s not at all clear where you’re meant to place the gauge or how you’re meant to place it. There is a female screw mount on the bottom that appears to be the same size as a camera tripod mount, but this would mean leaving a tripod outside. It was all rather baffling and so before any experiments in mounts took place the rain gauge was popped into the ground where the rainwater could run off out of the bottom. As this isn’t the designed location it was soon moved to a more suitable spot above ground but the ideal thing would be some sort of mount that sticks into the ground, like those little solar lights you can get for your garden.

Putting aside the unusual ‘how to mount’ problem the unit itself works very well and is very much a setup and forget bit of kit. The data is fed back and accessible via the slick Netatmo app, and it’s presented in the same manner as the existing data and so feels like it’s always been there. You can also view the data on the website and via screen widgets on Android. Give it a few weeks and you’ll soon have data to view, even over summer it tends to rain overnight.

Is this a must have add on? Probably not, it does the job well but it was a struggle to think what uses you’d have for the data. Its useful if you’re into gardening and want to monitor the amount of natural rainfall and of course it’s interesting to see how much rain falls if there is a full on storm, but after the novalty of the new data wore off it’s not been looked at as much as the existing data already collected by the main station.

If you want to expand your Netatmo setup this is a well built module that easily slides into the ecosystem, it’s badly let down by the lack of support when it comes to the mount, which could see you spending additional cash if you don’t have anything suitable to use.

Available now on Amazon: https://amzn.to/1rwm8Sm