The Netatmo weather station is a great looking little gadget for those interested in very local weather, and given the stereotype of Brits involves an obession with weather it should go down rather well in the UK! Looking around at other weather stations and you can’t help notice how old fashioned most of them are. Not so with the Netatmo, the designers have clearly been attending the Apple and Nest school of design as this is a really nice looking set of kit.
The station comes with two modules, an indoor module and an outdoor module. Both stations connect via Wifi and the collected data is viable via an app or on the Netatmo website.
Curiously for an `outdoor’ station it can’t actually be placed directly outdoors where it might get wet, it needs to be sheltered, for example in a garage or shed, and this is an area that really could do with being developed for future modules for those who don’t have a suitable sheltered area. The outdoor station runs off batteries and, at the time of writing, there is loads of juice left in the batteries after just over 2 months use.
Note that unlike other weather stations the outdoor station isn’t designed to monitor wind speed or rainfall, although judging by the Netatmo website an additional rainfall module will be available soon. One of the advantages of this platform is that new modules will hopefully be designed and introduced over time.
The indoor station is powered by USB, annoyingly for such an expensive product there was no UK plug included, you’ll need to buy this or make use of a spare.
Setup was very easy and once completed there isn’t much to do, you need to wait and allow for data collection. Both the app and the website are excellent, they’re very easy to use and they present a lot of data in an easy to understand manner. As well as data collected by your stations you can also view a weather forecast for the coming days. At the time of review aside from the graphical representation there isn’t much else you can do with the collected data. This isn’t an issue for me but might be for you if you’d like to export the raw data for use elsewhere.
In terms of data the station collects indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity, the indoor module also collects pressure, sound and CO2 levels.
Mobiles benefit from Netatmo widgets which can be added to your screen. These looked excellent on a Sony Xperia Z1 Compact and allowed quick and easy access to weather data without having to open the dedicated app.
The Netatmo looks very stylish and is supported a by fantastic and easy to use app and website, it’s just a pity that for the price it didn’t come with a UK plug and that positioning the outdoor module could be a problem for those without a sheltered area.
Available now from Amazon: https://goo.gl/XybyUa
