Summerdale, AL, Part II: Up on the Roof
After a storm moved through the area, the hot, humid weather finally gave way to several days of cool, windy weather. It was a good time to stay indoors and finish getting our photo files straightened out after our external hard drive crash the week before. We're very grateful nothing appears to be missing after the data was recovered by Tech Advanced Computers in Pensacola. Paul also spent time setting up and running a backup of our computer files. The software is now set up to run a backup every week, but we may do it more often when we're doing a lot of sightseeing and downloading a lot of photos.
As we said in our last post, this is a good reminder to back up your computer NOW. It's not a question of if you'll loose data, but when. Paul with his engineering mind put off backing up the files because he was evaluating how best to do it under our circumstances. He evaluated just a little too long this time.
The day after Paul got the computer backup finished, the wind died down. Since it was still cool, he decided it was a good time to go up to the roof to check the caulking and to clean up the roof. The surface of the fiberglass gets chalky because of exposure to the weather, and rain washes the chalky residue down over the paint on the sides. Wiping down the roof and applying a coat of wax a couple of times a year helps. Paul just needs to remember the roof can be a little slippery if he goes up there again in the first few weeks after the wax is applied.
Paul had to climb past our new weather station that is mounted on our rear ladder on his way up to the clean the roof, so it was a good reminder that we hadn't mentioned our new toy in our blog. Back when we were in Pittsburgh, we ordered a Vantage Vue weather station from Davis Instruments.
We have been considering the purchase of a weather station for quite a while. We always want to know how cold it got last night or how hard the wind is blowing or how much rain we got. We put off the purchase because Paul couldn't decide which weather station to buy. Then when we were at the Escapade back in September, our neighbor had a Vantage Vue. When Paul researched the models from Davis Instruments and compared them to those from other manufacturers, he found the ones from Davis were consistently rated more reliable and more accurate. We bought a flag pole mount from a vendor at the Escapade so we could mount the sensing unit on the ladder.
The next photo is a closeup of the sensing unit.
We can now get all kinds of interesting information about the weather like temperature (inside and out), humidity (inside and out), wind speed and direction, rainfall, barometric pressure, heat index, wind chill and more. We can get current conditions, max and min over the last 24 hours, and max and min over the last 25 days. If we program the GPS coordinates into the weather station at each stop, the Vantage Vue will also estimate the time of sunrise and sunset.
Another interesting piece of data from the weather station is the rain rate. During the storm that moved through the area when the hot, humid air moved out and the cool air moved in, the rain rate was over 5 inches per hour at one point. Thankfully, it only rained that hard for about 10 or 15 minutes, but we did get over 2 inches of rain during the storm.
Since we're on the subject of weather, the forecast is calling for bright sun, temperatures in the 70s and little wind for the next few days, so we'll finally be doing some sightseeing. We'll tell you all about it in our next post.
Paul yoy mite want to also use a remote secure backup also.
Like www.carbonite.com that could be used to restore data.
MSA HEFH lab tech
Wes Mayles
Posted by: Wes Mayles | November 10, 2010 at 07:04 AM