I had to move the Anemometer because it was going to be in the way for some upcoming home repairs, so I moved it onto its own pole and raised it up a few feet. It now is measuring wind speeds at 20 feet above ground level and 9 feet above the closest high point. (before it was 16 feet). Hopefully this will provide better wind speed measurements. The new pole seems to be a bit sturdier, but time will tell. If there is too much vibration at high wind speeds I'll have to drop it a few feet.
This was the first time I've had it down since it was put into operation back in Feb. 2005, so I took it apart and verify things are still in good shape and changed the lithium batteries so it is ready for another winter. The unit is in fair condition, the bearings have a little bit of friction (showing a bit of wear), and so a replacement will probably be needed in a year or two. Pretty much on schedule to what I've heard from other users.
It was a perfect early evening for the change as we had no wind. Had the system taken down and starting piecing the new pole together and then stopped for supper. After supper the wind picked up to a light breeze, so I lost 2 hours of wind data. As the unit was put back into operation, we were starting to get gusts in the mid 20km/h and a light drizzle. Storm from the north coming through tonight. (calling for winds up to 40km/h).
I also placed the sun temperature sensor on this new pole and it is about 13 feet above ground and facing directly south.
Also have a new higher quality web camera coming. Currently testing it and working on better location.
Happy weather watching...JZ

Did some house keeping on the web site.
- fixed a few links
- correct the history data tables due to errors with the large amount of empty data when the weather station was down.
- fixed all top level menus to be the same
- Detail page weather forecast had problems as CBC changed their website. Now getting data direction from Environment Canada's page.
- Few other minor adjustments.

After over 4 years online with almost no outages, the weather station suffered a minor hardware failure that ended up taking a month to repair. Of course the failure happens when I'm not around to fix it. After few new batteries, forcing channel re-detection and rebooting the entire system (giving the one computer a good kick in the butt), the system came back up.
Sorry to leave a you unsure what to wear or whether to take an umbrella to work.

Some weather data that I was able to retrieve from the weather station console (as it continued to track the weather):
From July 7 till August 10, the station tracked 83mm of rain.

The hottest temperature this year was recorded at 31.1 Celsius on August 1 at 5:55pm

Had a web page outage from May 24 late evening till May 25 1pm. The weather station was still working fine, just nobody could see the information from the Internet - it was working fine for me :-).
The Telus router/modem went weird after I tried to apply a correction to the setup. All the firewall rules where there, just nothing was working. So after deleting the reapplying the rules (a number of times!), it finally took. Note to self, Telus router/modem is flaky and do not make any changes to it. Wish I could still use the much better Linksys Router and the external ADSL modem I had in before this Telus router/modem.

Updated the front page some more. Found the front page was a bit bloated (updated the code to fast and didn't optimize it), so I went through with a fine tooth comb and shaved off about 50kb. Page with all the content averages about 260kb.
Still planning on updating the rest of the site one of these days - too many other jobs on the go.

Interesting site MediClim - [url=http://www.mediclim.com]www.mediclim.com[/url] I came across a few weeks back, but only got to looking at it tonight.
The topic of weather and health issues is debated back and forth. U of Calgary did a study a few years back on migraines and Chinooks. Article Preview
I've wondered how much the weather affects one's health and well being, so I sign up for all alerts and we'll see what comes of it. If it seems to work, I'll see if I can extract the data and re-publish it here when the alerts appear.
Let me know of your experience if it works or not.

Today's Current MediClim Alert:
-Asthma
-Arthritis
-Heart Disease
-Diabetes

Working on an updated website with new features. No worries, the site will still have a familiar look and feel, just new features and more information. Feel free to comment and add suggestions.
A preview can be viewed here: (Removed and front page is now updated. Rest of the site will follow in the coming weeks.)
Cheers Jeff

Happy New Year!! Been busy with other things, so I haven't done much on the weather site. Things appear to be running along smoothly. This mid February the site will have been running for 4 years! Post a comment if you wish to let me know if you find the site useful. Originally the site was just for me to access when I was working in Sundre and had to drive back and forth. I then made it public as others where interested in live minute by minute weather. Over the 4 years I've had very few down times and have had over the last 2-3 years very accurate readings for my location.
I did a quick statistic the other day and found that this past December 2008 the coldest day hasn't been beaten since 1996 when the coldest day in December then was -38.0 Celsius. 1998 saw the coldest day at -31.5C and 2000 max coldest day was -29.5C.
Stay warm!

Replaced backup batteries with new Lithium batteries (good for the winter cold season) in anemometer and outside temperature/humidity sensor. Rather do that now when it is nice than to have to replace a battery in -20C with a wind chill!

The sun temperature sensor is normally a temperature only sensor on top of the pole, but FreeWX-Wi has problems with this sensor when the temperature dips below 0 Celsius. So for the winter I changed it to a temperature & humidity and placed it on the pole. This sensor doesn't catch as much sun light in the morning and evenings in the summer months.